27 Aug 26 – Making Our Suffering a Gift to God

It's very, very common that people come to the clinic and they say, Doc, You need to help me.

There's got to be a pill.

There's got to be something to make me feel good.

And one of the challenges in our current day society is that we see suffering as something terrible.

We're not supposed to feel bad.

That's not supposed to happen.

You know, there's really two main things in our society that I think are plaguing us immediately and causing a lot of our ills.

One is this idea that we're supposed to have perfect lives and we're supposed to settle in and not suffer, not feel bad.

And then the other thing, which is kind of married to that is that since we're not supposed to suffer, we're supposed to always feel good and we're supposed to get whatever we want right now.

So there's no sense of waiting.

There's no sense of, of always being in preparation.

It's a matter of, if I want something, I'll pull out that credit card, I'll order something and hopefully get it in an hour.

You know, everything's virtual.

So if I want information, it's there.

Long gone are the days where people used to go to the library and go to the Dewey Decimal System and pull out different information or find the book in the library and cross-reference and index.

It's all in this one little very convenient box of the computer, which is true.

and it is convenient, but it doesn't lend itself to developing our virtue.

So really, today's kind of a part one of two different shows.

Today, we're going to talk about suffering and sacrifice and what that means.

And the next show, which is going to be a follow-up to the show, is going to be talking about virtues and how they help us into thinking that we might not necessarily need everything right away.

And that's a good thing.

Sometimes waiting for things or having to wait for things is very it builds the catholic character it builds the soul which is if we think about it why we have periods of anticipation and waiting such as adamant before christmas lent before easter and we'll talk about those on the next show but today let's talk about suffering and sacrifice and what the difference is and let's look at it from a perspective of a patient so I've had a lot of patients come to the clinic and very common, like I said, you know, I want a pill for something.

One of the ones that I remember was a poor gentleman.

He was probably in his fifties and his wife of 20 some odd years passed away and he was in a lot of pain, understandably.

So I think if I say that any of our listeners will say, yeah, of course he's in pain.