About Suffering

About Suffering

Suffering is defined in the dictionary as undergoing the feelings of pain or distress.  This could be done willingly, as an offering to God, or unwillingly, as a person in pain from a disease.

Why do we have to suffer? I have come to believe that God has us suffer to bring us closer to him.  If we never walked in the darkness, we could not recognize or appreciate the Light.  As humans, we have the tendency to only call on God when we need something, much like the college student, who only calls home when they have run out of money.  We pray when we lose our job, get sick, lose a significant relationship, feel we have been wronged someone, or feel like we just can’t possibly get through another minute of our day.

I have a couple of people who are close to me who have recently been diagnosed with cancer.  Both of them are very kind, sweet, loving, healthy living, and relatively young people.  It is hard to understand why this would happen to such wonderful people. Why not inflict the leader of North Korea with brain cancer? Or maybe that guy who kidnapped those women in Cleveland for ten years?  Or Hitler? Why didn’t he get hit with stage IV prostate cancer?   I know this doesn’t sound very Quakerly of me and I apologize.

I do know this:  there is a God and I am not God.  I know nothing of God’s plans.  He does have a plan for each one of us and that plan is perfect. He has a plan for this universe and for those of us who are followers of Christ and have the wonderful future of eternal life in His presence.  I firmly believe in this afterlife and am looking forward to spending eternity in His presence and finding out the answers to all of these questions.

As a codependent I suffer along with all of my loved ones in that I feel like I am responsible for the their diseases, pain and suffering.  If they hurt, it is my duty to hurt too. It is also my responsibility to fix them. I have to feel their pain and cure their cancer. It sounds crazy, but as a life long codependent that grew up being responsible for everyone else all the time, that is how I think.  Thus I spend a lot of time in anguish and torment. How can I fix it? If I obsess long enough about it I can figure it out, right? Wrong.
So what do I do with all of this? I am not God. I am not a doctor, surgeon, therapist, guru, healer or priest. I am just me. Just your average Josephine trying to walk through this world.

So I do my 12 steps.

1. I admit I am powerless over others, that my life has become unmanageable.  I am obsessing about my loved ones and am in the midst of the codependent crazies.

2. I come to believe that a Power Higher than myself can restore me to sanity.

3. I make the decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God, as I understand him. In other words, turn it over, let go and let God.  I didn’t cause it, I can’t cure it.

4.  I make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. I am practicing my defects of over responsibility, obsessiveness, compulsiveness, caretaking, feeling other peoples feelings, making other people more important then myself and self abuse, just to name a few.

5.  I admit to God, myself and my sponsor the exact nature of my wrongs.

6.  I become entirely ready for God to remove these defects of character. It doesn’t serve me to try and fix everyone else, obsess about him or her, have my heartache like I was them.  I have enough heartache about all of it enough already.

7. Humbly ask God to remove my defects of character.  I also ask Him to help me through this suffering. I ask Him to heal my loved ones.

8.  Made a list of all people I have harmed and become willing to make amends to them all.  This list is short this time. I am harming myself. I am neglecting myself and overburdening myself by taking the whole world on my shoulders.

9.  Made direct amends whenever possible, except when to do so would injure others.  I forgive myself for judging myself for not being good enough. I forgive myself for not being able to cure cancer. I forgive myself for being healthy when my loved ones are sick.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when I was wrong promptly admitted it. I need to get the focus back on me and what God wants me to do.  I need to do what is in front of me.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God as I understand God, asking only for the knowledge of his will for me and the power to carry that out. What is my role in this God? Do I have the courage to pray ONLY for God’s will? Do I have the courage to let go of what I want and just focus on what He wants? That takes courage, faith and trust.  I pray for the strength to do this.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, I seek to carry this message to other codependents and to practice these principles in all my affairs.

I surrender.  I humbly recognize that I am merely dust.  God knows all. I know nothing. This entrance into suffering is His way of bringing me closer to Him and needing Him more. I am grateful for these experiences. Although they are very painful, these brushes with mortality, even if they are experienced through others, help the rest of us to remember to live in the moment, cherish the little things in life, and let go of everything else. The only thing that matters for me is to follow God, to pray without ceasing, and to do what I think he is calling me to do.  I read his Word, listen to his voice in Meeting and try and walk the walk as best I can.  Suffering produces fruit.  It makes my faith stronger. It makes each sunrise that much brighter.  I am grateful.  God is always good.

Juliet A. Wright
juliet@hiddenangel.net
Author, publisher, singer/songwriter,teacher.
Author of “Everything Is My Fault,” Singer/Songwriter for two albums “Fearless Moral Inventory” and “Beloved”