As servants of God we have commended ourselves in
every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships,
calamities. 2 Corinthians 6:4. And not only that, but we also
boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance.
Romans 5:3. [He] consoles us in all our affliction, so that we
may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the
consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. 2 Corinthians
1:4. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed,
but not driven to despair. 2 Corinthians 4:8. For this slight
momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of
glory beyond all measure. 2 Corinthians 4:17. I am overjoyed in
all our affliction. 2 Corinthians 7:4. For this reason, brothers
and sisters, during all our distress and persecution we have been
encouraged about you through your faith. 1 Thessalonians 3:7.

In your distress… in time to come, you will return
to the LORD your God and heed him. Deuteronomy 4:30. Trust in
him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him. God
is a refuge for us. Psalm 62:8.

But [Lord] you do see! Indeed you note trouble and
grief, that you may take it into your hands; the helpless commit
themselves to you; you have been the helper of the orphan. Psalm
10:14. Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am in distress. Psalm
31:9. Answer me when I call, O God of my right! You gave me room
when I was in distress. Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer.
Psalm 4:1. Relieve the troubles of my heart, and bring me out
of my distress. Psalm 25:17.

The LORD is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold
in times of trouble. Psalm 9:9. For he will hide me in his shelter
in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his
tent; he will set me high on a rock. Psalm 27:5.

When you pass through the water, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you
walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall
not consume you. Isaiah 43:2. Do not fear, for I am with you.
Isaiah 43:5.

In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God
I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry
to him reached his ears. Psalm 18:6. When the righteous cry for
help, the LORD hears, and rescues them from all their troubles.
Psalm 34:17.

Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain
you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved. Psalm 55:22.

…..

The Roman proconsul ordered: ‘Take the oath, and
I shall release you. Curse Christ.’

Polycarp said: ‘Eighty-six years I have served him,
and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who
saved me?’

And when he had said these things and many besides
he was inspired with courage and joy, and his face was full of
grace, so that the proconsul was astonished…

And with his hands put behind him and tied, he looked
up to heaven and said:

"Lord God Almighty, Father of the beloved and
blessed Servant Jesus Christ,.. I bless you, because you have
deemed me worthy of this day and hour, to take part in the number
of martyrs… for resurrection to eternal life… May I be received
as a rich and acceptable sacrifice For this and everything I praise
you, I bless you, I glorify you, through Jesus Christ, your beloved
Servant, through whom be glory to you with him and the Holy Spirit
both now and unto the ages to come. Amen."

And when he had concluded the Amen and finished his
prayer, the men lit the fire…

How does someone facing a painful death get to have
this sort of faith?

First, here’s a truism so obvious that it is likely
to be ignored or even denied: all of life is trouble. We in the
West have been seduced into believing that, properly organized,
we can buy our way out of trouble. The advertisers promise a trouble-free
existence if we purchase their product. The insurers promise to
cover any contingency, for a fee. We have government social welfare
benefits on a scale unheard of in most of the world for most of
history. Which is why, of course, that the suicide rate is climbing
in affluent countries. We have been ‘sold a dummy’, and life is
too catastrophic to endure when trouble comes.

On a visit to the U.S., the well-known German preacher
Helmut Thielicke was asked the most important question facing
Americans. He said Americans did not know how to deal with suffering.
He thought they did not expect trouble to be part of life. ‘Again
and again, I have the feeling that suffering is regarded as something
which is fundamentally inadmissable, disturbing, embarrassing
and not to be endured.’

We are taught by our sick culture to indulge continually
in what Albert Camus called ‘nostalgia for other people’s lives.’

One of the few generalizations you can make about
the greatest men and women of the Bible is that they all got into
trouble. God must love his special people a lot to trust them
with problems! An interesting text in the Psalms says, ‘Before
I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word’ (119:67).
Jesus promised his followers three things – constant trouble,
and constant joy (because of his constant presence). The early
Christian missionaries had this important piece of encouragement
(!) for young converts: ‘It is through many persecutions that
we must enter the kingdom of God’ (Acts 14:22).

The New Testament word ‘thlipsis’, ‘affliction’,
is used fifty-five times in the New Testament, referring to persecution,
oppression, famine, judgment, or even the labour pains of childbirth.
The early Christian leaders said trouble was not merely to be
endured, but even welcomed!

Thus St. Augustine thanks God, in the Confessions,
for ‘mercifully sprinkling my path with thorns’.

Malcolm Muggeridge saw life as ‘a very bright light
and a very deep darkness, an inconceivable hope and blackest despair,
an overwhelming love and abysmal desolation.’ There are some things
we come up against which we have to adjust to, because they will
not adjust to us. Our handicap or problem can become the foundation
for strength – and even happiness. What you do to life is much
more important than what life does to you. The way out is always
the way through, not around or away. The good news really does
come by facing the bad news. It is possible ‘to fail forward,’
and sad indeed is the person who does not know this and thus allows
the experiences of life to be wasted on him or her.

A young lady was just eighteen when she contracted
a dreadful illness. To save her life, the doctor said he must
amputate her feet. This he did, but the disease spread further,
so he took off her legs to the knees. Later he amputated her thighs.
Then it broke out again in her hands and arms: first one arm,
then the other were taken off, right up to the shoulders. She
was left with only her trunk. For fifteen years she lay there.
The walls of her room were covered with Bible texts, all of them
affirming God’s gifts of love and peace and power. That woman
mediated such grace from her room that hundreds of people were
converted to faith in Christ through her letters.

How did she write? A carpenter friend fitted an instrument
to her shoulder into which a pen could be inserted. We write with
fingers, hand and arm: she had to use her whole body, but her
writing became as beautiful as copperplate. She eventually collected
fifteen hundred letters telling of people blessed by her. When
asked how she did it she smiled and replied: ‘Well, you know,
Jesus said that those who believed in him, from within them would
flow rivers of living water. I believed in him – that’s all!’

Mozart died in abject poverty; Beethoven – of all
people – started to go deaf at 28; Stevenson was writing novels
while dying of consumption; Handel wrote The Messiah when he was
broke; George Matheson, the Scottish preacher who wrote the great
hymn ‘O Love That Will Not Let Me Go’ was blind; Lord Byron had
a club foot; the philosopher Kant had an incurable disease; Wilberforce
took opium for twenty years to deaden his pain; Helen Keller was
blind and deaf…

So our prayer is not for easier lives, but to be
stronger in faith, and hope and love. Remember trouble comes to
those who don’t deserve it – but so does love!

St. Theresa had problems, and once complained: ‘Lord,
if this is the way you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you
have so few of them.’ But why is there a ‘St.’ before her name?
Because through her trouble she came to believe that ‘everything
is grace’. ‘In his will, our peace’ – T.S.Eliot calls this statement,
from Dante, the profoundest line in all of human writing.

Well…?

…..

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.
It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend
it. Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly
understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult. Because
once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer
matters.

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult.
Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly,
about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their
difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should
be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their
difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should
not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them,
or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation,
their race or even their species, and not upon others…

What makes life difficult is that the process of
confronting and solving problems is a painful one… Since life
poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult
and is full of pain as well as joy.

Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving
problems that life has its meaning… Problems call forth our
courage and our wisdom; indeed they create our courage and our
wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and
spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human
spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve
problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our
children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving
problems that we learn. As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Those things
that hurt, instruct.’ It is for this reason that wise people learn
not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to
welcome the pain of problems.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1978, pp. 15, 16.

There is no misfortune from which some good may not
be derived.

Spanish Proverb

I came across something that would be with me throughout
my life. Oppositions break or solidify a person. I determined
they would solidify me. I wouldn’t bear things; I would use them.
As a radiant woman said, ‘My cheeks have been slapped so much
they are quite rosy.’

E. Stanley Jones, A Song of Ascents: A Spiritual
Biography, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1968, p. 48.

Hello trouble, (you –) I’ve met with you before
– So now you’re here again, Bigger than ever, larger than life,
Ready to cause more and more strife And break me if you can. My
hands are tied behind my back My legs they are in chains, My health
is not what it used to be I do have aches and pains, My responsibilities
loom large And there are those who on me depend Whom I wouldn’t
see hurt for the world – So buzz off trouble. But if you’re going
to stay: My brow you may crease, my shoulders you may bow, My
mind you may scar, my nerves you may break, Mark you I said MAY;
But mark also if you stay I shall surely grow and grow, And my
spirit, my soul, you cannot touch, For they belong to God and
me – And no matter what you do or say They always will be free.

Ken Walsh, Sometimes I Weep, London: SCM Press Ltd,
1973, p. 112

When I read of the barbarous ages of slaughter and
carnage and brutality through which my long line of ancestors
threaded its fearsome way, it is perfectly astounding to me that
not one of them got stabbed or clubbed or shot until they had
duly taken their places in that long genealogical list. When I
think of the wars and famines and pestilences through which those
forebears of mine came unscathed, I catch my breath.

F W Boreham, The Tide Comes In, London: Epworth Press,
1958, p.15.

I repeat then: the secret of responding heroically
to trouble is not something highly complicated; it lies in one’s
view of the relation of God to each and every event. If we separate
the two, and see God off somewhere else as impotent and indifferent,
this means we are left alone with our troubles and are thus inadequate
and ultimately defeated. But if we take the biblical stance toward
life, and see him everywhere, in each event, either intentionally
or permissively but always creatively, then we can take heart
and be assured that our trouble is not totally bad or beyond the
possibility of working good.

Our challenge then, in trouble, is to remember Who
is also there and what this means, and to work at the job of increasing
that awareness until it is perennial.

John R Claypool, Learning to Use our Troubles, An
unpublished sermon, January 21, 1979

The saints look at their lives, half full of joys
and half full of sorrows as anyone’s life is, and they see it
as half full, while others see it as half empty. The saints are
grateful for the full half. They ‘count their blessings’. They
know that their very existence is sheer gift, and so they know
that great and joyful virtue of gratitude, so tragically neglected
in our day. No one can understand life without being grateful
for it. No one can wholly misunderstand life if they are grateful
for it.

Peter Kreeft, ‘Seven Lessons from the Saints About
Suffering’, in John Wimber, (ed.), Equipping the Saints, Vol.
2 No. 1, Winter 1988, p. 6.

…..

Lord, we cannot always see beyond our pain and sorrow
to the triumph of faith!

We think we have cause to complain when things go
badly for us: when friends let us down, when neighbours hurt our
feelings, when sickness and death deprive us of happiness. Help
us to see clearly, how much greater is our cause for joy and hope
through the love you pour into our hearts; help us to see that
all these things that hurt us are the trials through which we
triumph through the power of him who loved us;

so that in good times and bad our lives may honour
you, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Alan Gaunt, New Prayers for Worship, Leeds: John
Paul the Preacher’s Press, 1978, p. 5

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, though your
people walk in the valley of darkness, no evil should they fear,
for they follow in faith the call of the shepherd whom you have
sent for their hope and strength.

Attune our minds to the sound of his voice, lead
our steps in the path he has shown, that we may know the strength
of his outstretched arm and enjoy the light of your presence for
ever.

Daily Mass Book, Lent 1991-1992, Brisbane, The Liturgical
Commission, p.170

God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we
cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the
wisdom to know the difference.

In everything we do, in our troubles, difficulties
and hardships we show we are God’s servants. By purity, patience
and kindness, by the Spirit and by our love, and by our message
of truth, we show ourselves for what we are. We may seem poor,
but we make many rich; we seem to have nothing, but we possess
all that there is to have…

If Christ’s name is flung in our teeth we should
count ourselves happy, because that glorious spirit, the Spirit
of God, is resting upon us.

If we suffer, let it not be for murder, theft or
sorcery, nor for infringing on the rights of others; but if we
suffer as Christians we should feel no disgrace, but confess that
name to the honour of God.

It gives us a share in Christ’s sufferings. That
is cause for joy!

Giver of the present, hope for the future: save us
from the time of trial. When prophets warn us of doom, of catastrophe
and of suffering beyond belief, then, God, free us from our helplessness,
and deliver us from evil. Save us from our arrogance and folly,
for you are God who created the world; you have redeemed us and
you are our salvation.

Almighty God, you see that we have no power of ourselves
to help ourselves; keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly
in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which
may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault
and hurt the soul.

God of opportunity and change, praise to you for
giving us life at this critical time. As our horizons extend,
keep us loyal to our past; as our dangers increase, help us to
prepare the future; keep us trusting and hopeful, ready to recognise
your kingdom as it comes. Amen.

A New Zealand Prayer Book, Auckland, Collins, 1989,
pp. 116, 119, 133-135.

Allow the strength of God to sustain you, The wisdom
of God to instruct you, The hand of God to protect you, The shield
of God to defend you, The Spirit of God to lead you, The Son of
God to redeem you, Until by the grace of God, We see him face
to face. Amen.

E. Lee Phillips, Prayers for Worship, Texas: Word
Books, 1979, p. 136

…..

A Benediction.

Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere
in prayer. Romans 12:12. Blessed is anyone who endures temptation.
Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life
that the Lord has promised to those who love him. And after you
have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has
called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore,
support, strengthen, and establish you. James 1:12; 1 Peter 5:10.
The LORD answer you in the day of trouble! The name of the God
of Jacob protect you! Psalm 20:1.