Source of All Our Comfort by Sherry Antonetti

All suffering reveals who does even the littlest of things with great love. The Holy Spirit uses those moments when we are most anxious, most fearful, to call us to pray, to call others to pray, to call us to serve and others to act, to bring all of us to the foot of the cross. It is a severe mercy that God uses even our greatest pains to call us to Him, but consider the alternative, that all suffering is meaningless and arbitrary and simply a brutish part of reality.

Suffering is something we do not tolerate well. God knows we are little. Over and over and over again, Christ heals all who come to him and asks. He heals the sick, He cures the blind, He raises the dead, He forgives the sins and calms the seas. Christ is moved with pity for us in our littleness, he came to remove all our pain. Even as he cures the ten lepers, only one recognizes the source of his aid and grace. Often, we do not seek meaning for our sufferings great and small, only an ending of them.

This does not mean God is sending suffering or that we should be thinking, "Bring it on," only that God is using suffering to His own good ends, to reveal the depth of his love, and the depth of love present in the World as indicated by how His children respond. The Good Samaritan is only revealed by his actions for the unjustly beaten, robbed and injured victim. The sufferings of the man lying on the side of the road and ignored by the first two that walked by, again, reveal who is loving his neighbor as himself.

If we trust that God is, that God loves, we can know that God has a perfect plan for us; then all suffering is resplendent with the opportunity for grace. If we really trust that God is, that God loves and thus God has a perfect plan to bring us to Him, we can go forward with great courage and a quivering joy into the harshest of worlds with the most unfriendly of people or the most difficult of situations.

Why does our Lord, our Loving Savior permit us to endure suffering and death? "So that the glory of God may be revealed." God uses the sorrowful mysteries of the cross to bring us to Him, to bring us closer, to crack open our hearts. It is comforting to know, not one moment of our lives or of our pain is ever ignored or unknown by our Lord, and that all He wants for us, is peace in our Hearts.