Embracing pain and suffering.

I've been reading Walking with God through Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller.  It is helping me understand the value and reason for suffering.  I have been through suffering in many ways.  I have sought to avoid suffering and sought to bear suffering well.  I am realizing that the act of suffering itself is beneficial.  To embrace suffering seems contrary to rational thought but it is imperative if we are to grow and become all God has planned for us.    

I searched the meaning of the word suffer, and this website's explanation was interesting to me.  

“Robert Johnson, a Jungian oriented author, points out that the word "suffer" comes from the Latin sub plus ferre meaning "to bear or to allow." To suffer in this sense is to allow something to happen, perhaps, to allow ourselves to experience the responsibility for life choices which permits consciousness to grow. When we suffer in this sense we are opening ourselves to experience the fullness of life’s diversity as a natural process of growth. Such a "suffering" with life must occur for psychological and spiritual maturity to develop. The philosopher Alan Watts speaks to this point when he says, "Because human consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness." Life’s goal is to increase consciousness; so, the temptation to avoid life’s legitimate pain must be resisted.” - http://www.lessons4living.com/happiness.htm

Then my thoughts were:  Continually looking for pleasure or less suffering, is the loss of consciousness.  That is why people do drugs, to lessen their experience of suffering, to be less conscious of it.  Enduring suffering is the process that allows us to feel, to feel other’s hurts, to have compassion.  Jesus has compassion on us because He has suffered like we do.  He knows how to comfort us in our suffering.  God does not stamp out suffering because it is good for us.  It makes us alive.  It gives us dimension.  It deepens our faith in Him.  It removes us from the shallowness of self-absorption and pleasure seeking that makes us dead and hollow and unloving and unneeding of God.  Suffering is a break with the pleasure we so admire, but which is our undoing.  Pleasure is an addiction to not feeling anything real or true and is a numbing effort to relieve us of the pain of being separated from God.  

Many people question God's goodness because there is suffering in the world.  Suffering can be a result of evil in the world, but I think our suffering is God's gift in the face of evil.  Our lives on earth are meant to make us see our need for God and to live in relationship with Him.  He knows that He is the true source of our joy.