In the Daily Mass Reading for Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time we see another example as to why we must not reject suffering if we are to consider ourselves followers of Christ and children of God.

Hebrews 12:4-7; 11-15: “Brothers and sisters:
In your struggle against sin
you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood.
You have also forgotten the exhortation addressed to you as children:
My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord
or lose heart when reproved by him;
for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines;
he scourges every son he acknowledges.
Endure your trials as ‘discipline’;
God treats you as his sons.
For what ‘son’ is there whom his father does not discipline?
At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain,
yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness
to those who are trained by it.

So strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees.
Make straight paths for your feet,
that what is lame may not be dislocated but healed.

Strive for peace with everyone,
and for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
See to it that no one be deprived of the grace of God,
that no bitter root spring up and cause trouble,
through which many may become defiled.”

(Via USCCB.)

It is clear that we must endure the sufferings and trials that God permits us as a means of discipline, as a way of straightening out our path in holiness and this grow closer to God.

It is not an easy road that we trudge. Our destiny is the happy one, not the way leading to it.

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