I Found a Better Way to Look at Suffering

Yesterday was a great day, and a terrible day. 

I spent most of it with my fiancée. We went to Mass, grabbed a delicious brunch afterward, and registered for wedding gifts. Then I got a text from my childhood friend. He checked himself into the ER with migraines, and an MRI revealed a giant tumor on his brain. A couple hours later, another dear friend shared that his preemie baby had not survived her first day.

I tried to push through the rest of the day with a smile on my face. But I was laid low by the terrible news.

How can life be at once so filled with beautiful and terrible things?

How can we simultaneously celebrate glorious new beginnings and suffer shattering tragedies?

I came home after the day’s activities and broke down in tears. In Romans 12:15, Saint Paul says to “Weep with those weep.” So I did. 

As I sat at my kitchen table crying for my friends’ awful situations, another Scripture verse hit me. Psalm 56:8 —“Are my tears not stored in your flask, recorded in your book?”

I realized that God was with me and, more importantly, with my friends who were enduring their own unimaginable tears. He was “collecting our tears in his bottle.” And a thought occurred: one of the best responses to all this tragedy was to try and fully live my own blessings.

People will get sick. They will lose loved ones. Relationships will fail and dreams will sometimes die. 

But…

New dreams will be born. Along with new babies. New relationships will rise from the ashes of old broken ones, and those relationships deserve our full commitment and care. 

What’s the best response to death and loss? Maybe it’s fully living life and celebrating all the blessings you do have. 

Yesterday was a great day, and a terrible day. But isn’t that what life is? A continuous ebb and flow between peace and turmoil, laughter and tears, good times and bad. It’s always the best of times and the worst of times. 

So cry when your heart is broken and you need to cry. But also live. Choose life in the face of death and loss. 

Looking back on yesterday, I realized that’s what I was doing while I was registering for wedding gifts with my future wife. Consciously or not, I was choosing life and love.

Without question, my fiancée and I will face trials, have fights, and endure loss and tragedy in the years ahead. But we will also love, laugh, and soak in the world “charged with the grandeur of God,” in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

It’s easy to succumb to the darkness and sorrow life brings. But the beauty and blessings are just as real.

Whatever your situation, try to see the real good along with the bad. 

As Andrew Osenga sings:

No one can be sad enough, if they really look around

No one can be glad enough, if they really look around

So look around. See the bad and don't run from it. Cry and grieve. Weep with those weep. But also, as Paul says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice” (Romans 12:15).

“Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good” (Romans 12:21).