You're the Reason I'm Suffering

For some reason, my Moravian Text Email didn't come this morning so I had to go to a "Random Scripture Generator" to provide my passage for reflection this morning. I was amazed as to how much it applied to our lives.

From 2 Corinthians Chapter 1:

3Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 5For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. 6If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. 7And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.

NObody chooses suffering. At least not intentionally. It's unamerican. In fact, one of the hardest things about my job is that I am actually encouraging people to do hard things, and that is not something we are accustomed to. But hard things do come whether we want them to, even to "normal" people who don't choose them.

Remember the old song by Andre Crouch, "Through it all?" Part of it says, and I quote from memory:

So I thank God for the mountains, and I thank Him for the valleys,
and I thank Him for the storms He's brought me through;
For if i never had a problem, I'd never know that He could solve them,
I'd never know what faith in God could do."

Paul explains all this to the Corinthians in a very logical way. He says:

1) We should praise God in our troubles because it is during those times that we can experience God's comfort.

2) When we experience trouble and then God's comfort, it empowers and enables us to then share that comfort with others when they are in times of trouble.

In fact, he even takes it a step further and suggests that being able to comfort others is the very reason why any of us have troubles in the first place ... so that we can identify with others and help them in their times of distress. And finally, Paul says:

3) We can have a firm hope because we know that all of us can not only share in our sufferings, but also in our comfort.

My past five years of blogging and reading blogs have certainly shown me that this is true. Whether folks want to put it in religious terms or not, we have done a lot of sharing in sufferings and in comforting one another.

SO it's all YOUR fault you know, that I suffer. :-) It's so that I can experience God's comfort and then pass it on to you.

I had a poster when I was a kid that said:

Trouble shared is trouble halved,
joy shared is joy doubled.

Let's halve our trouble, and double our joy!