What Suffering Is Doing

No one signs up for the slow grind of this fight expecting to be grateful for it. 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. He is saying it is not wasted. 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.

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, because it rests on the love of God already poured into you by his Spirit, not on your track record.

The weariness itself is doing something in you that comfort never could. That does not make it fun. It does make it meaningful.

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.