Want to Get Stronger? Ask God for Suffering!

Calm down. Breathe. It is not masochism. God does not wish anyone to suffer. He is infinite love! However ... suffering is necessary for our growth and maturation. No father, nor mother likes to see their child suffer, but they know, for example, that it is necessary for them to take an antibiotic injection, very painful, to cure a throat infection. This suffering of the child is necessary for his own good, to save his life.

This is the way God works in our lives. He always has our greatest good in mind: the salvation of our soul so that one day we can be eternally happy in Heaven with Him. To make this possible, and always respecting our freedom, He allows certain pains and sufferings, always calling us to look higher, to rise up to Him, and thus be able to overcome everything that afflicts us.

This truth was once much clearer to human beings. Until a few generations ago, it was not common to see people complaining about the inevitable sufferings of life. In the face of the greatest catastrophes, one would usually hear, "It's God's will ..."; "God allowed it ..." And people would wipe away their tears and move on. It was much more common than today to see in people the resignation of Job: "The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord!" (Job 1:21)

However, maybe even because of the very technological evolution and the facilities that we have nowadays, people have become weaker emotionally and more susceptible: they cannot stand the slightest setback. The less effort a person needs to make to achieve something, the weaker he becomes and the less able he is to face adversity. Another contributing factor is the mentality of living in search of pleasure and running away from pain. This mentality is typical of animals, irrational beings, who cannot live any other way. They are programmed by their instincts and only have the capacity to blindly obey them.

Human beings, because they are endowed with reason, have the ability to choose whether or not to follow the impulses of their bodies, and for this reason are far superior to animals. A dog, when it sees a female dog in heat, can have no other attitude than to seek to copulate with her. Now a man or a woman, no matter how much desire they feel, has the ability to say no to sexual intercourse. The big problem of our time is that people are living more and more like animals and giving up their ability to reason and choose the good and not just what feels good.

And what is the best way to overcome this hedonistic mentality and effectively become a strong person? To suffer! Not in a masochistic way that takes pleasure in pain, but in an eminently human way, which knows that he needs to dominate the unruly impulses of his nature and this is only possible through suffering, through the balanced renunciation of these very pleasures. This is a wisdom that comes from ancient Greece, but which lately is very out of fashion.

You can start by renouncing small pleasures, like waking up as soon as the alarm goes off and not waiting in bed for another minute, or drinking water instead of juice at lunchtime, or letting the temperature of the bath be a little colder than you would like. There are countless possibilities that we have every day to strengthen our will and increase our mastery over our own body.

A second, deeper step, which requires complete trust in the goodness and mercy of God and his infinite love for each of us, is to actually ask God to send us suffering. But not just any kind of suffering. It is the suffering that He foresaw, from all eternity, for you, so that you can free yourself from your selfishness and can love more and better each day.

Father Joseph Kentenich, founder of the Schoenstatt Movement, prays: "Father, I ask you for every cross and suffering that you have prepared for me ... because your love always watches over me" (HW 393 and 400). This attitude that he calls Inscriptio (inscribing my heart on God's heart) is only possible when we are certain that God is Father, that he is my Father, that he loves me and would never send any kind of suffering that was not for my own good.

And the most amazing thing is that when we manage to reach this level of filial trust, our lives become much lighter, we live in peace, even in the midst of the greatest storms. We become stronger and more prepared to face life's challenges. Of course, through our own strength this trust is impossible. We must insistently ask for this grace and also do our part, with constant renunciations of the small licit pleasures in our lives.