“If you suffer, thank God! -- it is a sure sign that you are alive.”
~Elbert Hubbard.
If you are alive, you will suffer; it is one of the sad facts of life. Pain, physical or mental, can have many effects on a person’s life; it can limit your daily activities, it can confine you to your home or even your bed, it can cause you to be irritable or impatient with those around you.
Mental suffering is perhaps the worse of the two; while physical pain can be debilitating, mental turmoil is perhaps even more so. Mental pain, caused by continual snubs, loneliness, abuse, or mental illness, can make people seclude themselves from other people, even purposeful harm themselves. The vast majority of suicides are caused not by physical pain, but by mental. And just as physical pain can necessitate a person to remain in their bed, mental suffering can seclude a person who is not unable to leave their house just as entirely.
Physical pain is, usually, only temporary. While you suffer it, it seems unbearable; and yet somehow you always manage to bear it. And perhaps the bearing is easier than the expectation. When you go to the doctor’s to get a shot, you spend the entire time of sitting in the waiting room dreading the inevitable moment when the needle pierces your skin. But when it does, the pain lasts perhaps a few seconds. The puncture wound may be sore for a while afterwards, yet in eventuality, you are the better for the shot. It’s like that with all pain, is it not?
All pain is, in eventuality, good for us. It tests our character; teaches us patience, humility, fortitude. Just as metal must be tested in a fire, so we must be tested by pain to see how strong we truly are.
“Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3-4).
We are told “He who suffers much will know much”. Can suffering and pain help form us into wise and knowledgeable people? Says William Somerset Maugham, a novelist and playwright from the early 1900's,“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive”. Certainly, pain can have such an effect on you. But only in so much as you allow it to. In Romans 8:16-17 we are also told that “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs; heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.” So if we wish to be glorified with Christ, must also we suffer?
How can the gold be found if we do not first rub away the grime that hides it, disguising it as any other encrusted stone or pebble? Through pain the filth that conceals our true strengths and holiness is rubbed away, revealing our true worth as the heirs of God.
“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
—2 Corinthians 4:8-11”
“For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
—2 Corinthians 12:10”
