Redemptive Suffering for Caregivers

For suffering —of others, or our own, often both—to become redemptive requires participation. Not performance. Participation.

It asks for a posture of surrender — not because surrender is noble, but because suffering eventually removes our illusions of control.

Many of us are trained to rise above suffering: stay positive, stay strong, make meaning, push through. 

But suffering is not conquered by resilience. It is transformed by consent.

The moment we stop demanding an explanation and simply say, God, help me, something shifts inside us.

Someone once said, "We don't learn from experience. We learn from reflection on our experiences." Likewise, without reflection, suffering is only pain. With reflection, suffering becomes relationship, and turns experience into grace. 

And when we accompany others in suffering, we discover something unsettling and holy: we are not standing outside their pain. We are meeting them inside our own.

And it is here that we find true empathy, not the implied distance of sympathy, of pity. True empathy is communion. And communion is where Christ is.