This Too Shall Pass

We suffer because of the choices we make, others make, and at times because of fate. I fear the suffering of some future unknown pain. It is a lack of trust in God when I worry about the intensity and the duration of future suffering, and if I will be able to withstand it. Daily I need to say to the Divine, “I trust in You.” What we fear we manifests. Exercising faith blesses one with a continuity of peace. If one focuses on love, it manifests one’s glorious potential.

Photo byWesley TingeyonUnsplash

The Christian Way speaks about entering into the suffering of the Christ. Jesus suffered on the cross. Living in this physical world each of us experiences suffering. Do not ask for more than what you’ve been blessed with just as one does not ask for greater consolations than God has in His mercy bestowed. With heartfelt gratitude and single focus of mind on the gift giver say thank you to whatever befalls one, whether of suffering and tribulation or joy and consolations. Both are gifts from God. Bend one’s knee and say thank you God and then let the suffering or consolation pass through as the next moment will bring something different. When we get stuck in our suffering or fear losing our consolations, we miss the gift and the opportunity to show great reverence and love to the gift giver. That is what is important: continual prayer, continual focus on the giver and not the gifts being rained down from the heavens. Trust that God does not allow more suffering than one can withstand.

As the Buddha taught, life is suffering from birth until death. This world grants many opportunities to suffer, but we always have the choice to attach and wallow in our suffering or allow our suffering to pass through our lives as blessings and gifts from our Creator. Do not attach to suffering any more than you attach to a gift of relationship or a material object or activity. Let go of all except one’s focus on God and eventually let that go as well. Feel compassion, help whoever you are able – there are so many in need – that is a first step.

Where is the Eternal Bliss? Beyond the physical – in the physical world one must go through suffering because the physical world of attachments is a world of suffering. All hold the essence of God within, so we are children of God living in bodies of flesh and blood. Suffering may become as nothing because we are going through it wrapped in the cloak of God.

Love and suffering are flip sides of the same coin. There is suffering of the body, but even more suffering of the soul. First is the suffering of the body, denying the body the pleasures and hungers of this world that it desires, or accepting the pains and torments that happen along our path. Then is the suffering of our mind and heart as we lose, or fear to lose, that which we are attached. Spiritual suffering happens when God withdraws His Spirit and allows us to learn and grow on our own. It is a terrible pain, a blackness, a hopelessness and all we can do is cling to Him in prayer, even when we feel our prayers are vanishing into the ether, unheard. Suffering will end. Just as everything in this life changes, so will our suffering.

God is there. in our suffering whether one can feel the Eternal Presence or not.