This is the topic the world has no answer for and the Church has spent two thousand years learning to speak about. Suffering is the thing no one asks for and everyone meets. The Church doesn't explain it away. It does something braver: it places it inside the Cross, and shows that nothing is wasted there.
The Church teaches that suffering, entered into with Christ, becomes redemptive. That's a bold claim, and it's not the same as saying suffering is good. Suffering is an evil. But God is the kind of God who can bring good out of evil without the evil being any less evil. The Cross is the proof.
This means your pain is not pointless, even when it is pointless to you. The Church teaches that when you unite your suffering to Christ's, it joins His work of saving the world. That sounds impossible until you remember that He chose to need us — that He let His body, the Church, share in His suffering and His glory.
And the Church refuses the easy answers. It won't tell you this happened because you lacked faith. It won't tell you to smile through it. It will sit with you in the ashes first, the way Job's friends did before they started talking — and then it will point, gently, to the Resurrection that comes after, without telling you exactly when.
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
Paul isn't minimising your pain. He's maximising the future. The glory isn't a denial of the suffering; it's the answer to it.
My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
The thing you'd give anything to be rid of might be the very place God's power shows up. Weakness isn't the obstacle. It's the opening.
St. Rita of Cascia
She lost her husband to violence, then both sons, then entered a convent where, it's said, Christ gave her a wound from His crown. She is the patron of impossible causes and of people who feel stuck in suffering that won't lift. She didn't get an easy life; she got a meaningful one, and she'd tell you there's a difference.
“The cross is the ladder to heaven. And how short it is.”
Tear this out. Try one this week.
- ✦Don't try to make sense of it before you've felt it. Grief is not a puzzle to solve; it's a weight to carry, and carrying is enough for now.
- ✦Tell God the truth about it — even the angry parts. The Psalms do. He can take it.
- ✦Let one person in. Suffering in secret is the heaviest kind.
- ✦Offer it for someone, even silently. It gives the pain somewhere to go.
