Suffering

I thought a lot about suffering today... the day's events all seemed to be focused on it and so tonight in my reflection and meditation on this day it just seemed natural to write about suffering.

The day started out as an ordinary Sunday. 10:30 Mass was full and the Mass was beautiful as always and I was feeling a wonderful sense of peace until right after the homily when someone near the front of the church began to have a medical emergency. Her tearful children were ushered out by a concerned family friend. A couple of doctors and a nurse in the congregation rushed to her aid and the rescue was called.  As they carried her out on a stretcher I felt myself tearing up, thinking of this young woman, her tearful children and her worried husband. Even in church, where I always feel the safest, we are not spared suffering.........

I returned to church in the evening for a special speaker that our youth group had invited. The woman invited to speak that evening was an elderly Jewish woman who had survived the death camps during World War II.  She talked about her childhood, her family and her husband (who had been sent to Auschwitz and who had lost his whole family) - she talked about how her sons were embarrassed to bring friends home from school because their parents had accents and how they were angry that they had no Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles or Cousins like their classmates. They did not know until high school about the things their parents had been through when they were children...

So this leads me back to suffering... why do we suffer? I know people who will say to me, "when an animal is suffering we put them out of their misery, why can't we do that with people. People who are terminal and suffering greatly with their illness, why can't we be kind and put them out of their suffering?" and I tell them the same thing every time... because human suffering is redemptive, an animals' suffering is not.

Our suffering, united to Christ's suffering, is redemptive, if not for us then for someone else. God uses our suffering to either sanctify us or gives the graces from our suffering to another soul that needs them.

I will remember that very ill woman from my church tonight in my prayers. I will thank God that the Jewish woman survived her horrors and is here to educate our youth about the sin and dangers of hatred and I will end this post with a part from the Diary of Saint Faustina in which Jesus said-

                  ''You are not living for yourself but for souls,

                      and other souls will profit from your sufferings."