Suffering is a crossroad. It is designed as the opportunity to break our arrogance, because we cannot escape the pain of it. That which we cannot control humbles us, though it feels distinctly unfair.
Suffering can be a blessing in disguise
… or a curse.
Which way will we take it?
This is a choice — a crossroad.
Because suffering is a crossroad there is temptation to go the other way and to further dig our heels into the firm ground resenting the pain of it.
When I first faced suffering as a 36-year-old twenty years ago I did not know what had hit me. I was flummoxed by it. Suddenly I was living in a parallel universe with life otherwise going on around me, yet I was living an absolute nightmare. Every day, every moment, was shrouded in emotional uncertainty. I had no scaffold with which to understand it… it undid me completely.
The gamut of grief descended and tabernacled in me for several months, if not a year or more, transforming my existence acutely in those first six months. That six months felt like a very, very long time.
I’ve used this experience a great deal in my pastoral ministry and counselling work — I was ‘held’ in this purgatory for an extended period where there was no possible escape for a reason.
So I would not forget, and because I couldn’t escape, I had to endure the crossroad experience day after day, week after week, month after month.
At the crossroad, the decision point comes, “do I make something of this situation I’m in… do I take the opportunity to improve, to grow, to apply faith, to choose to respond in a mature way… DESPITE how I feel I want to respond… OR do I allow the experience to crush me and get stuck in the mire of bitterness, resentment, and disempowerment?”
Do I make this about me
and the opportunity in this hardship?
Or do I make this about me
and how unfair the world is?
(In case we don’t know, the world is unfair, but there is an opportunity in that unfairness — to rise above it.)
Do you see the crossroad that suffering brings us to? It is a polarising place forcing us into the valley of decision.
We go either of two ways
but we can’t go both ways.
Do we believe that the things against us now
can be part of the making of us?
Suffering is a precipice where all kinds of futures beckon.
It won’t always be the way it is — so hard.
Our choice: do we build brick by brick a future that we believe is possible or do we rage against the machine?
The former has a future we hope for. The latter is defeat. Easy choice.
The choice is to do the hard work now for a beautiful outcome rather than deny we have the power to forge a good future.
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