What Suffering Is Doing

Not only this, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope: and hope doesn’t disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. (Romans 5:3-5, WEB)

No one signs up for the slow grind of this fight expecting to be grateful for it. If anything you expected it to be over by now, and the fact that it is not can feel like its own accusation. And yet Paul writes that we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Read that as a man who is tired of the long road and you find something worth sitting with. Paul is not saying the suffering is pleasant, and he is not asking you to enjoy the weariness. He is saying it is not wasted. That is a different claim, and a quieter one, and it holds up under the weight of a bad year. The very endurance you have had to build, the character being ground out of you by years of getting up again, these are not the leftovers of a failed process. They are what the process was making the whole time, in you, while you thought you were only losing.

Hope is at the end of that chain, and Paul insists this hope does not put us to shame. It will not turn out to be a cruel joke played on a man who trusted too much, because it rests on the love of God already poured into you by his Spirit, not on your track record. Your record could not bear the weight of hope. His love can, and it is the thing hope is anchored to.

The weariness itself is doing something in you that comfort never could. A man who had never struggled would have none of what these years are quietly forming. That does not make the struggle fun, and you are allowed to say so out loud. It does make it meaningful, which is a thing the enemy would very much like you not to believe as you sit here worn down and tempted to call it all a loss.

God, I am weary, and I have been tempted to call these years wasted. Show me the endurance you have been building, and anchor my hope in your love rather than in how far I think I have come.