HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, February 10, 2025 – The funny thing about suffering is that you can’t avoid it. Get rid of one ache, and another follows on its heels. What we have coming we have coming, and what we have coming we can’t avoid. We can delay, but we can’t avoid. If we truly accepted this, we’d use our time and energy more wisely.

I’m not saying you should seek out and embrace pain. I’m not counseling you to be a masochist. The self-flagellators of the Middle Ages had it all wrong. But I’m also not saying to disobey God if he directs you to do this or that to alleviate your pain. There’s no martyrdom in suffering if God has given you an out. You don’t get spiritual brownie points for enduring what you don’t need to endure. All I’m saying is that whatever God puts on your plate you might as well go ahead and eat, because you’re not leaving the table until God says you’re finished.

When it comes to suffering, our job as born-again believers is to patiently endure. We’re to suffer in silence not because we’re aspiring martyrs, but because we know that God has everything well in hand, including our suffering, and he won’t allow us to suffer more than we can handle. But he’ll also not let us avoid pain that we’ve either brought on ourselves or need to endure as a test. In this, as in everything God does, his judgement and measurements are perfect.

When David conducted a census that God had warned him not to conduct, he set himself and his people up for punishment. Diplomatically, God offered David three punishment options: three days of pestilence, or three months of being destroyed by an enemy, or three years of famine. David chose the first option because, as he put it, he’d rather fall into the hands of God than the hands of man. And so, the pestilence came as per their agreement, killing 70 thousand men before God told his avenging angel that was enough.

In everything we do, we need to put ourselves into God’s hands. He measures our suffering to the iota, just like he measures every other aspect of our lives. If we allow God free reign to give us our due rewards, whether for good or evil, we benefit in the end, not only because we get over with what needs to be gotten over with, but because God may choose to have mercy on us and shorten our suffering. Being permanently pain-free will not happen here and is not something we should strive for, as being permanently pain-free will only happen in Heaven. Still, Jesus promises that God will shorten the time (and thus shorten the suffering) of those who’ll be on Earth during the tribulation, just like he shortened the time and suffering that David and his people had to endure for the census sin, and shortened Jesus’ time on the cross. We can’t demand God’s mercy, but we can hope for it.

Ultimately, putting ourselves fully and firmly into God’s hands and agreeing to suffer whatever God knows we need to suffer is the wisest, fastest, and best way Home.