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My beloved Pastor Tom, who baptized me at 23 years old and performed our wedding ceremony when I was 24, is a Texan Baptist Preacher. From the pulpit one Sunday morning, towering in his cowboy boots, I clearly remember the booming words that he spoke in his southern drawl. Lowering his hand, heavy-like to the pulpit he proclaimed, “Suffering either makes you bitter or better!”

Heaven help us! In this life there are disappointments and pain that could drag each of us out into the surf of bitterness and tow us under for good. Suffering, experienced in the flesh or in other equally devastating ways, is as common and bountiful as the sand on a gulf-shore beach. In every conversation we engage in, every sorrow we encounter, and every trial we endure, we have a choice. How we will respond? Those responses, layer by layer, accumulate within us bitterness or better-ness. Like a snowball growing larger and larger as it rolls downhill, how we choose to respond to adversity has a layering effect on our souls.

2 Corinthians 1:9 says, “Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.”

Living well, living a “better” vs. “bitter” life, equals relying upon God and trusting Him that there is purpose in our pain, that joy is coming, and that nothing in His economy is wasted.

Joni Eareckson boldly challenges us, “What a waste of an illness or injury if we go on talking day and night about that illness, that injury, and not about the God who allowed it for His own sovereign reasons.” Joni Eareckson, A Place of Healing

If through our weakness we are made better, if our pain makes us rely on Christ more fully, then absolutely nothing surrounding it was a waste. May God enable us to see disappointments, suffering, and pain as benevolent, even beneficial gifts.

(photo credit: unsplash, Charity Beth Long)