Suffering

There’s certainly a lot of suffering about isn’t there! Even if your life is going really well you just don’t have to look too far to find someone whose life isn’t.

In life things can go wrong in the blink of an eye - a car smash is just one example. That’s an accident; someone may be at fault but there was no harm intended. But then there’s robbery and violence, being scammed and so much more.

From within our bodies we struggle with illness; from the very serious and even life threatening, right through to the inconvenient, like a ‘bug’ that lasts a day or more.

To counter balance these bad things there’s no doubt that life has many joys, but along with the many sorrows. So what’s this chequered experience for? It’s a generally acknowledged thing that character is formed by adverse life experience. So if we allow them to, our life experiences, especially the adverse ones, help develop our characters.

One of my favourite verses in God’s Bible, when I think on the mostly adverse things talked about in this blog, is this one: “Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later.”  (Romans 8:18 NLT)

No matter how tough life is now, if we are aligned with God and waiting actively for His son Jesus to return, we can always be comforted by this verse.