Love your pain
Surely you have heard more than once that every Christian must carry his/her cross. You are theoretically willing to accept it, but have you noticed that the cross you have is never the right one? The cross you bear (your health, appearance, way of being, wife, husband, mother, children, neighbors) always seems unbearable, humiliating and harmful to you. On the other hand, all other crosses seem more appropriate to you, for example: a friend's or neighbor's cross, the previous one - the one you invented yourself. The hated one of yours upsets you and poisons your life. You are desperately crying out for another - one that is endurable, sublime, useful.
It is hard to come to accept your fate, with the weight you carry on your shoulders. You have two options: curse God and everyone around you, despair and become a cross for others. Meanwhile, life will still be filled with “valleys.” Moments of doubt are necessary for us. Just as the ore of a metal is useless, as long as it does not succumb to the metallurgical process. The cross is such a means of extracting precious metal from us. It purifies us from unnecessary, and cleansing hurts. Therefore, there is a second option: accept your pain. It can be said that, among our feelings, pain is a kind of outcast. We ignore it as much as possible - that is why we suffer even more. How many fights, discussions to accept our pain!
Make Lent an opportunity for you to look at your pain. What are you fed up with? What would you like to get rid of? What is bothering you? Try to see your suffering differently at least once. Do not think that it is so easy to "make friends" with it. Happiness has something profoundly painful and heavy about it. It includes consent to the situations from which you are trying to escape.
Look at Jesus walking on the Way of the Cross - at Simon of Cyrene, who thought that he had already finished his work in the field and is taking a well-deserved rest, when suddenly he is burdened with the Cross of the Condemned (how furious he must have been!). Simon of Cyrene had this unique opportunity to be reconciled with the pain, because he looked at Jesus and read from his face what it means to accept our suffering.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george