Here is a quote on suffering from the novel Adam Bede, by one of my favorite authors, George Eliot. Adam Bede had discovered that the woman he had given his heart to and hoped to marry had loved another man, been deserted by him, had his child and was condemned to die for abandoning the child. This passage speaks of how the tragedy transformed him, and how his anguish was unwasted.
For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and
delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his
sorrow - had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the
same man again.
Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and
our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it - if we
could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same
light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human
lives, the same feeble sense of the Unknown towards which we have sent forth
irrepressible cries in our loneliness.Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from
pain into sympathy - the one poor word which includes all our best insight and
our best love.
2 comments:
I love this quote. Thanks for sharing it. It is especially poignant to me this week as my pastor, Matt Chandler, suffers brain tumor/surgery/recovery. It's so true to say that suffering wouldn't be worth it if afterward we returned to being the same person we were before it began. There's hope in the fact that it changes us.
I often wonder, surely there's a better way to learn and be transformed than suffering?! But it is definitely a major tool in God's box and an inescapable reality of life on earth. Have you heard Steven Curtis Chapman's new cd "Beauty Will Rise?" I wept when I heard it.
We will continue to pray for Matt and all of you who love him.
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