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[GodChild]

When faith gets worn down by long-term suffering ... what do you do?

Edited April 5, 2007 by GodChild

[hoosieranna]

You say, "God, I'm going to let you deal with this for a while. This is too big for me and I don't want it. I'm going to give it to You, because You can deal with anything." You can add, if appropriate, "You know, I'm not happy with You, with this whole arrangement at the moment. I don't doubt You exist. I'm just giving you my problems to deal with for right now." Sometimes simply relinquishing responsibility helps. Everyone doubts at some point. Faith doesn't truly grow and evolve unless it is challenged.
It sounds really silly, but sometimes you have to pout. Life [i]is[/i] unfair. Whining about it to God makes issues seem less your problem and more His. It's like saying, "You did to me, You fix it." After you've pouted, stomped and thrown a right good fit, you come back and say "I'm ready." And you hope you are. We tend to be made of sterner stuff than we imagine.

[cathoholic_anonymous]

[quote]When faith gets worn down by long-term suffering ... what do you do?[/quote]

Thank the Lord that your faith is becoming real. It may seem hard to do, but this is something that all the saints had to experience. Pray to St John of the Cross and St Therese of Lisieux in particular for their special interecession. Above all, remember that Jesus struggled against despair and the temptation to run away in Gethsemane. "Stay with Me. Watch and pray."

I wrote the following blog entry not long ago. Hopefully it will help you:

[b]Faith is a verb[/b]

Last weekend I was able to spend half an hour talking alone with Ruth Burrows, a writer of modern-day spiritual classics such as [i]The Essence of Prayer[/i] and [i]To Believe in Jesus[/i]. Ruth Burrows is an elderly contemplative nun who has lived and prayed in the monastery since the age of seventeen.

“What do they do all day?” is a question that people often ask about contemplative nuns. While they do have a lot of practical tasks to keep them busy (cooking, stringing beans, looking after the beehives, making religious ikons, and, in the case of one eccentric sister, compiling scrapbooks of Johnny Cash) their main work is prayer. A lot of people, including a surprising number of Christians, don’t see prayer as an activity on a par with teaching or running hospitals or ministering to the homeless. But for Sister Rachel, prayer is most definitely a kind of work, and the faith that inspires this work should be treated as a verb - a ‘doing word’, as my nephew would say.

It is not easy to faith. Faithing is not a walk through a tranquil garden, but a struggle through the wilderness. It often involves some very hard choices. Last year a friend asked me in anguished disbelief, “Vicky, do you seriously expect me to believe in a merciful God? Still?”

It is not easy to faith. Faithing is not a walk through a tranquil garden, but a struggle through the wilderness. It often involves some very hard choices. Last year a friend asked me in anguished disbelief, “Vicky, do you seriously expect me to believe in a merciful God? Still?”

A pause. Then: “Yes.”

“Then you’re deluded,” she spat.

That conversation took place in a psychiatric hospital on the day after my friend (let’s call her Sophia) made a second near-fatal suicide attempt. She has been a patient there for nearly eighteen months now. She developed a cocktail of mental health difficulties after suffering nearly seven years of sexual abuse. She is fifteen years old.

Maybe I am deluded. But my ‘Yes’ wasn’t born out of wishful thinking or a desire for a fairytale ending to Sophia’s story. As I looked down at her as she crouched in a corner of the room, her eyes terrifyingly wide and harshly bright, there wasn’t a scrap of comfort or belief in me. Just…nothingness. That ‘yes’ went against everything that I was feeling inside. On the Tube train back to King’s Cross, I found myself wishing that Sophia could die just so that she wouldn’t have to bear this any more. ‘Faithing’ was a real fight for me then. I did not want to pray. I had to force the prayers through gritted teeth. Moving my fingers onto the next bead on my rosary felt like a superhuman effort. I didn’t believe. I couldn’t believe. My emotions were in open revolt. But in my heart of hearts I knew that belief should never be contigent on how you feel, and that faith is worth very little if you only do it when things are easy.

St Therese of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun who died at twenty-four, knew this very well. During the last eleven months of her life, as she succumbed to tuberculosis, she had no comfort at all from God. “Jesus isn’t doing much to keep the conversation going,” she wrote dryly. She was plagued by crippling doubts and temptations as the illness ravaged her body. But she chose to go on, trapped in what she called ‘an underground labyrinth’. She never gave up, and even her closest friends had very little idea of the spiritual torment she was suffering. She even wrote to one priest friend, “I am not dying, I am entering into Life…”

Therese’s ability to faith was so great that days before her death, when she knew that there was no hope of recovery, she was able to say simply, “I feel as though my mission is about to begin.” Perhaps this was because Therese understood painfully well that faith is not a possession. It’s something that you carry on doing until the second of your death - no matter what the cost.

*****

I have a lot of friends with serious mental health problems. Two of them are in very bad situations at the moment - Sophia has been reliving her horrific experiences for the police, taking them back to the places where everything happened; and one is facing the loss of her daughter, who is really the only reason why she wants to go on living at all. Suffering isn't easy. Watching other people suffer and being powerless to do anything about it is just as hard.

The only thing you can do is trust. The peace that comes with that is 'not the peace the world gives', but it's a thousand times more beautiful...and it doesn't have anywhere near the same fragility.

[AccountDeleted]

[quote name='GodChild' post='1230872' date='Apr 5 2007, 02:52 PM']When faith gets worn down by long-term suffering ... what do you do?[/quote]

I don't know what [u]you [/u]do, but I know what I did. I cried. And cried. And cried. And I asked "why?" a lot. And then I cried some more. Finally, exhausted, I asked God to love me because I really needed it. And He did. And then I cried some more, but because He loved me, a different kind of crying, a healing kind of crying.

And later I realized that He is always loving us, but we don't always need it as much as we do when we are suffering, so that is when He can come closest.

Cry on his chest, tell Him how much you are hurting inside and ask Him to help you. He is already there, waiting to show you just how much He cares. Jesus allowed Himself to die because of that love for us. Let Him show it to you now, when you need it most. Once, when I needed it most, these words were spoken directly to my soul ... "God is unbearable compassion."

At this moment in time, you are being held more closely than you could ever imagine - don't give up.

[Divine_Mercy504]

[quote name='nunsense' post='1230951' date='Apr 5 2007, 05:26 AM']At this moment in time, you are being held more closely than you could ever imagine - don't give up.[/quote]


Jesus told St. Faustina (I can't remember the exact quote) that when souls felt that they had lost God, that is when He is with them the most.

Rachel

[alicemary]

Boy that is a tough one. Mostly anything is easy in the short run, but when it gets to be long term, it takes all our reserves. I dont think it was easy for the Saints either...Dark night of the Soul wasn't written by a wimp, nor is the concept. The Lord was in a troubled state of mind in the Garden of Gesthemani, but He hung on and was soon hung on the cross.
Sometimes you just have to tough it out. It ain't pretty. When my Mom was dying I didn't think I had the strength to even get out of bed but I had to. I didn't have the luxury to say that I am going to lay here until this passes. When I lost a job I cursed the Lord and said 'Why me?'. In the long run He lead me to a far better job.
When you are young you worry about having your friends like you, or arguining with your parents and hating them. That does little to prepare you for the time when real issues enter your life. When you are faced with life altering decisions, death of loved ones or just the dryness of a once fulfilliing spiritual life. What you need to do is just hang on, have trust in your ability to get through it and learn by it, and know that Jesus never abandons you. Someone far better then I once said '....and this too shall pass.'
My prayers are that you find your inner strength and deal with this.
Alicemary

[Ora et Labora]

wow, that helped me too. thanks alice!

[williamb]

[quote name='GodChild' post='1230872' date='Apr 4 2007, 11:52 PM']When faith gets worn down by long-term suffering ... what do you do?[/quote]

Somebody was asked about losing faith once, and they said pray anyway, go to mass anyway, it doesn't cost that much time and it certainly won't hurt you.
Its a little like being nice to people costs nothing. Even if your heart feels cold as a stone, that might be the time when God choses to melt it.

[Totus Tuus]

This morning, when I was reading the Life of St. Joseph, the chapter was on St. Joseph's suffering before his death. They said that his greatest suffering was not his physical suffering, but, like Our Lord (whom he wanted most to imitate), it was the desolation he felt. He couldn't feel God's presence and thought he had been abandoned.

At the end of the chapter, it said that although Joseph felt very disconsolate and as if he'd offended God so as to lose His presence, God was actually closest to him and "helping him to bear up under" the temptations and sorrow.

It's just so hard when you're actually experiencing the desolation. There's not really anything that can console you. It's all you can do not to give up and lose faith. But God knows that's how it is for us "children of Eve" in the "valley of tears". He knows and He uses the sufferings for His own reasons and for us to grow stronger.

[DiscerningSoul]

Never give up hope!
Hang in there!
Prayer!

[stlmom]

One of my favorite Christian writers is Thomas Merton. During Lent, I usually re-read parts of his book, [u][/u]Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander[u][/u], a collection of bits and pieces of observations and meditations of Christian life. He writes, "We too often forget that Christian faith is a principle of questioning and struggle before it becomes a principle of certitude and peace. One has to doubt and reject much in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after one has begun to believe, one's faith must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of foregone conclusions."

Sooner or later, if we call ourselves Christian, every one of us will face some crisis of faith in our lives. Nobody gets a free and easy ride to the Lord. It is part of the journey we take if we truly seek God. Even if you don't feel like you have much faith, live and act as if you do. God is with you, and suffers with you, too. God bless!

[sismaria]

Here are two quotes from St. Francis de Sales that helped me when I was suffering much...

Sometimes we have no consolation in the exercise of holy love...but on the contrary are oppressed with a thousand fears and frightened with a thousand false alarms which the enemy raises round about our hearts...And then we labor not only without pleasure but with an exceeding distress...the heart falls into a certain inability of thinking of their end, and consequently being eased by hope. Faith...assures us that this trouble will have an end: but the loudness of the shouts and cries which the enemy makes in the rest of the soul will scarcely permit the advice of faith to be heard.
O God! now it is that we are to show an invincible courage toward our Savior, serving him purely for the love of his will, not only without pleasure, but amid this deluge of arrows, horrors, distresses and assaults as did His glorious Mother and St. John upon the day of His passion.


"But what is the soul to do that finds itself in this case? It knows not how to behave amidst so much anguish; nor has it any power save to let its will die in the hands of God's will; imitating the sweet Jesus...For so this Divine Savior, near unto his death and giving up his last breath with a loud voice said, "O Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." a word, which was his very last, and the one by which the well-beloved Son gave the sovereign testimony of His love toward his Father. When therefore all fails us, when our troubles have come to their extremity, this word, this disposition, this rendering up of our soul into our Savior's hands, can never fail us."

I will keep you in prayer. Sister Maria

[Piamaria]

I prayed for you especially at The Veneration of the Cross. All I can ever do is look at Him on the Cross and remember that He didn't stay there and neither will I.

Edited April 6, 2007 by Pia

[GodChild]

It's not hard to find a helping hand in here. :

I suppose endurance is the key. I though about that during the Good Friday Mass and how endurance alone must of got Jesus through the passion. But then I felt inside me that Love is not seperate but is all the good things in us .... for instance, being patient is love, being slow to anger is love, perseverng is love.

Well Happy Easter everyone and thanks

[alicemary]

In times of crisis, when all hope seems lost, is the time to just say 'Lord, take over. I can't handle this anymore'. Then just leave everything in His capable hands. We tend to over think things instead of just having faith in the Lord. He sends us these trials from time to time. We just have to say 'Yes'. It is not easy alone, but then again, with Jesus by our sides, we are never alone.
Happy Easter.
Allicemary