Just How Would I Suffer Well?

Some questions have the most perplexing answers as to be hardly answerable.

There are some questions to which there are many answers (some right, some wrong) and there are other questions that seem to have no expressible answer.

How to suffer well?

Surely if we are to ‘suffer’ it will be a matter of despising the experience, no? This is one possible deduction.

Another explanation may be that one person’s suffering is for another a completely different experience. That’s the angle I’d like to attend to, here.

Resilience is the mastery of situations perplexing. They are what they are – horrid and reviled – but there is a peace that transcends the understanding that this is actually a bout of suffering.

Faith is the answer to the question, “How?” Hope is the answer to the question, “Why?” Now is the answer to the question, “When?” Hope is, again, the answer to the question, “What?”

And hope is the answer to the question of “Just how would I suffer well?”

If we have no hope we will suffer poorly. But if we have hope we suffer better than most people would believe possible.

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As we suffer, when we suffer, we, therefore, go on committed to hope.

We find it in the paradoxical, this answer to our question – what we most need (hope) we are most likely to struggle with. Grief is the temporal absence of hope.

So, if we suffer we might as well suffer less by suffering well.

As we draw deeper into the fissures of the Divine in our relying on God, we tap into hope by the inspirational things we read, by the positive truth-lovers we associate with socially, and by the good thoughts we choose.

As we refocus, every moment if necessary, we anchor ourselves to the reef of hope.

Against the tide of fascist indignity, we claw our way, with gritty fingernails, back to that place called hope.

We make hope the obsession. It helps, ultimately. It’s only by faith that we fight for our sanity these ways – to implore God of the gift of hope; enough to get through.

Hope is the grace of sufficiency enough to survive the hollow moment.

With hope we have everything else.

For hope we ought to fight.

Give everything for it.

Pray for the insight of hope for when it’s needed.

There will come a time.

Hope is emergent when we enter suffering with some sort of unworldly joy.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.