I Love Suffering

Suffering.  Being at the end of yourself.  Being on the edge of your tears.  Being full of emotion and humanity, the inner tearing away of all the makes you impure and which extracts the raw, ballistic, unapologetic you.

In the Christian faith we call it the refiner's fire.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death.
We call it a thorn in our flesh.
Agony.

I love suffering.
I love suffering not because I'm a sadist.  Not because the luxuries of life have bored me so I fulfill out of my need an existential necessity of struggle, but no.... I love the desperation and the striving and the adventure and the answer of suffering.
Can you remember the last time a scenario of your life was so difficult it made you sweat?
In Luke 22, Jesus sweat so profusely, not from a physical work out or from torture or any sort of physiological exertion, but from anticipation.

Boy there sure isn't enough of that these days.
He wasn't being tormented, he wasn't being hurt or burned, but his sweat came from a knowledge of what was to come.

I find that fascinating.

I also love suffering because it connects us with all that is in our humanity.
People in ordinary life, in the normal stride of the day dealing with a normal set of problems will place themselves on top of their worlds, I suspect, because they are actually so insecure that a pretense can only serve up a dose of painkillers to their emotional insides.  When we're connected to the truth there's something so special about that and this is what I mean in specifics:
We are human beings.
Without all the answers.
With great big tears from great big hearts.
We are vastly connected to other people.
We are extravagantly dependent on others whether we accept it and realize it or not.
We are beings that yearn for something better.
To be honest there is so much more to this, and so much more we receive from suffering that I could list little sentiments like that all night, but I'd like to keep it brief.
Suffering not only exposes the person that we rigorously tuck away on the inside but deals with that person to shape and transform the core of who we are and we leave our moments in life that we call suffering, changed.
And who doesn't want change?
Oh, I guarantee someone could read this and say, "I actually don't want change.  Things are alright, or at least I could see something better, but I've been through a lot and would like to rest here a while. Change isn't for right now."
I promise you it is.
You must change.
The world tells you you're alright.  You're not alright. You're imperfect, you've got flaws and not only that, you're scared of them in places so deep if you found them exactly you'd be lost in yourself.
Stop.  Don't turn off this blog, this is for you.
You've got to change.
And not because you're bad and God hates you.
Because part of your beautiful story includes a God that picks you up after you fall,
a good, caring and loving God
Who loves you so much.
That He won't mind.
Bringing you to your desperation.
To your anxiety.
To your exhaustion.
To the pain you carry, all for the purpose of taking it away.  Draining it from you, like a bad blood disease.
You see, suffering doesn't stand alone.  It's not just suffering and then nothing.
It's suffering and then -- something new in God.
Bigger, stronger, more flame/element resistant faith.
Things in Christ you always wanted like a bigger heart.
More compassion.
Gifts.
A knowledge of who you really are and what's really important.
This is the fellowship of Christ's sufferings, being conformed, even to His death.
Yes, I love Christ and I indeed love suffering.  His suffering.
Which is my comfort.
2 Cor. 1