Restlessness and Redemption Suffering (Throwback Thursday)

Restlessness and Redemption Suffering (Throwback Thursday) July 26, 2017

I’ve slowly been updating links from old, pre-Patheos posts, since the individual page links don’t seem to port very well. Yesterday, I came across this post from two years ago about restlessness and redemptive suffering.

The fact that something causes you to suffer is not sure evidence that you need to tolerate it. Suffering is an evil, theologically. It is a privation of a good–all suffering comes down to the lack of goods that we were created for. If you are suffering and you can address the privation at the root of your suffering without sacrificing some higher good, then you should do so!

However, as Simcha mentions in her discussion of NFP, sometimes suffering comes from things we can’t easily address–from sin in the world, from our own brokenness, from the social mores around us, from poverty, illness, or circumstance, from the privations we cannot fill by our own power. Sometimes the hardest suffering isn’t in what is done to you, but in patiently bearing the weight of impatience with what is.

…Pain drives us to action; we grow restless, we want to move, to do. Isn’t this so true? And so redemptive suffering doesn’t feel redemptive.

You can read the rest in my archives. 


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