Minimizing Our Suffering

Have you ever looked around your life and seen so many people “truly” suffering that you are tempted to minimize your own? Doesn’t it sometimes feel selfish and self-indulgent to weep over your (small amount of) pain when there are people “out there” who are REALLY experiencing TRUE pain?

I struggle with this propensity myself and I hear it in the voices of women at events coast-to-coast too. One of the truths I try to remember to believe myself—and I remind women of over and over again is that pain is pain, suffering is real. To restate an old poem:

Yes. We can cry over the man who has no feet, but it is also hard to walk over pointy rocks and broken glass when you have no shoes.

Of course, we want to keep all suffering in eternal perspective. This life is our one opportunity to suffer with our Elder Brother, and so we fight for the faith to be content, even in the valleys of darkness and weeping. But that doesn’t mean we don’t weep.

Ed Welch says all of this much better than me: