Suffering Well?

Not really. I am struggling this Good Friday to be still. One loving gaze from the Crucified usually sets me right, but today my attentiveness wanes. I wait before Him restlessly. Maybe I console Him with faith in His wounds for the wounded.

Lent began with Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. He rapes her citizens to show his power and to reclaim something of Russia’s former reach. If Putin succeeds there, he may proceed to capture nearby nations that once made up the USSR. I just returned from one such nation, Lithuania, and my friends wait for a miracle. Please pray for Jesus to unite one people whose hope, strength, and integrity overcomes the evil now evident in Putin’s disregard for human life in the Ukraine.

By Your wounds we are healed. Heal the wounds of the Ukraine.

Less obvious than Putin is the culture of death in America. Though Joe Biden has rallied quickly to defend the dignity of Eastern Europe (for which I am grateful), he violates that dignity continuously by championing abortion and transgender rights. Is there no intrinsic difference between men and women? Does not a child in the womb have rights too? I marveled at how his choice for Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, answered ‘culture of life’ questions; a brilliant woman, she dismissed the question of ‘when life begins’ with a silly ‘I don’t know’ and responded that she could not comment on gender differences because ‘she was not a biologist.’

Otherwise compassionate, just leaders who refuse to advocate for what it means to be human fuel a sexual devolution that is wrecking us. Every day we at DSM face its fall-out: young men and women morphing into self-absorbed sexual ‘variants.’ It is unjust, inhumane, and cruel like death.

By Your wounds we are healed. Heal America’s wound of abdicating basic principles of life for fake justice.

Good Friday unites our suffering with the suffering God. May we suffer well by entrusting wounds big and small to the One who suffered to restore our dignity.

‘Do not let me shut my eyes to the magnitude of the world’s sorrow or to the suffering of those nearest to me.’ Caryll Houselander