Wednesday, July 13, 2011

The Short Life-Span of Suffering

One day suffering will be swallowed up. It will be engulfed. The things that often torment and haunt us now will eventually be defeated and we will triumph with joy abounding forever. Eternity offers us the hope that our present sufferings are only temporary.

Paul says in Romans 8:18 (ESV) "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us."

These things we face, and everyone faces them, will eventually be history. God has promised victory. One day those in Christ will experience this victory. Dostoevsky, the 19th century Russian novelists, understood this. In his book The Brothers Karamazov he makes this amazing statement:

"I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man's Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world's finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with men."*


Many are going through different trials and tribulations today. Would you pray for them today and ask the Lord to strengthen and encourage them? Would you also pray for the Lord to bring forth the day in which all things will be restored, and the above description comes to pass? Suffering does have a short life-span. We must remember that. It is partly how we are able to carry on in the midst of it.

How can remembering suffering has a short life-span serve to better endure it?

Related posts: A Prayer for the Overwhelmed

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*Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 235-236

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