Suffering Well?
Author: Andrew Comiskey
April 15, 2022
Not really. I am
struggling this Good Friday to be still. One loving gaze from the Crucified usually
sets me right, but today my attentiveness wanes. I wait before Him restlessly. Maybe
I console Him with faith in His wounds for the wounded.
Lent began with Putin’s invasion
of the Ukraine. He rapes her citizens to show his power and to reclaim
something of Russia’s former reach. If Putin succeeds there, he may proceed to
capture nearby nations that once made up the USSR. I just returned from one
such nation, Lithuania, and my friends wait for a miracle. Please pray for
Jesus to unite one people whose hope, strength, and integrity overcomes the
evil now evident in Putin’s disregard for human life in the Ukraine.
By Your wounds we are
healed. Heal the wounds of the Ukraine.
Less obvious than Putin is
the culture of death in America. Though Joe Biden has rallied quickly to defend
the dignity of Eastern Europe (for which I am grateful), he violates that
dignity continuously by championing abortion and transgender rights. Is there
no intrinsic difference between men and women? Does not a child in the womb
have rights too? I marveled at how his choice for Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji
Brown Jackson, answered ‘culture of life’ questions; a brilliant woman, she
dismissed the question of ‘when life begins’ with a silly ‘I don’t know’ and
responded that she could not comment on gender differences because ‘she was not
a biologist.’
Otherwise compassionate,
just leaders who refuse to advocate for what it means to be human fuel a sexual
devolution that is wrecking us. Every day we at DSM face its fall-out: young
men and women morphing into self-absorbed sexual ‘variants.’ It is unjust,
inhumane, and cruel like death.
By Your wounds we are
healed. Heal America’s wound of abdicating basic principles of life for fake
justice.
Good Friday unites our
suffering with the suffering God. May we suffer well by entrusting wounds big
and small to the One who suffered to restore our dignity.
‘Do not let me shut my
eyes to the magnitude of the world’s sorrow or to the suffering of those
nearest to me.’ Caryll Houselander
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