Learning to Put God’s Will Above Our Own

Last post in this mini-series on pain (How Pain Teaches Us to Love Like God) we saw that God often wants to use pain to help make us saints who love like He does, but that He needs our cooperation.  So how do we let Him use pain to mold us?  How do we say “yes” to Him when pain seems to push us towards a resounding and rebellious “no”?

There’s three things Christians have been leaning on for centuries: the sacraments, reading Scripture and prayer.  In this post I want to focus on prayer since in today’s busy world it too often gets ignored.  That it’s so easily ignored, though, just shows it’s not properly understood – so, what exactly does prayer do and why do we need it?  why does it seem like God doesn’t answer our prayers sometimes?

In prayer we turn our hearts and minds to God.  Often we’re asking something of God during prayer, which He encourages us to do because we’re His children.  In fact, Jesus told us “Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you will receive it, and you will” (Mark 11:24).  Yet we’ve all had experiences where we’ve asked for things in prayer and it seems like God hasn’t responded.  This is perhaps most acutely felt when we’re in pain and despite almost constant pleas to God to end the pain, it has continued.  How can we make sense of what seem like unanswered prayers?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us “The prayer of faith consists not only in saying ‘Lord, Lord,’ but in disposing the heart to do the will of the Father. Jesus calls his disciples to bring into their prayer this concern for cooperating with the divine plan” (2261).  In other words, we’re to make our requests to God with the understanding that His will must come before our own.  And we do this in faith, trusting that because God loves us He always wills what’s best for us.  So if we’re praying for an end to our suffering, and that end has not yet come, it’s because the God who is love has something even better in store for us than if He ended our pain right when we asked.

This is why prayer is so important in our willingness to let God mold us as He sees fit: because like Jesus we’re to pray, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39).  The amazing thing about prayer is that the more we focus on the divine will (even though we’ll never completely understand it) and say, “not as I will, but as You will,” the better we come to understand His will and favor it above our own.  Sometimes the best we can do is to pray, “I want to want to put Your will above my own” but even this prayer is a sign that God is working in us.

If you’re struggling, I can’t encourage you enough to pray.  Pray set prayers, pray spontaneously, pray by reading Scripture – pray however you want, just pray!  If you want to understand why God is allowing whatever is going on in your life, you have to spend time with Him and give Him the opportunity to show you how He’s working and why He’s doing it.  God wants to tell you because He wants to work with you (and not in spite of you).  If you pray regularly, your heart and mind will become conformed to God because you will be opening yourself up to God’s grace.  And it’s this grace that will enable you to say, “let the pain mold me into the person you made me to be; let it make me into a saint.”

Did you miss Part I of this post?  See: Why Does God Allow Suffering?

Did you miss Part II of this post?  See: How Pain Teaches Us to Love Like God

How Pain Teaches Us to Love Like God

So in the last post we saw that God puts our spiritual welfare ahead of our physical welfare, but why does he need to use pain?  Pain has to be viewed through the lens of love, otherwise we will never be able to make any sense of it at all.  Pain’s main end is always love, meaning that all pain is ultimately intended to 1) make us more loving, and 2) help us better come to know God’s love.

But we’re fallen creatures with disordered wills.  Thanks to the Fall, we naturally put our own selfish desires above God and His love.  And so we have to train ourselves to put God first and trust Him.  We have to discipline ourselves to live by God’s law until it feels more natural.  We have to learn to want and love Him above everything else, which is perhaps the hardest thing of all to do.  Because one minute we’re promising to put Him first (fully intending to do, of course) and the next we’re acting as if we never made any such promise.

Pain can be purifying because it can teach us about love and sacrifice.  This isn’t a given, though, because pain makes us want to put ourselves first.  Pain makes us want to think of nothing but ourselves and finding a way to stop the pain.  And certainly it is our right to try and stop or reduce pain, but what do we do when we can’t?  How do we act when we’re stuck with pain?  We can either complain and snap at those around us or we can choose to be friendly and loving towards those around us even though we don’t feel like it.  We can feel sorry for ourselves or we can find a way to serve others in our pain.  We can get angry and isolate ourselves, closing our hearts to love or we can fight through the pain and make the effort to love, thereby expanding our hearts.

Ultimately, pain can teach us to put the love of others before our own desires if we’ll let it.  In other words, it can teach us to love like God.  Jesus put His love for us above all His humanly desires to flee from the Cross.  He put our needs above His well-being.  Our pain gives us the opportunity to imitate Him, to put our love for others above our sufferings.

And this is what our earthly life is for: to serve God and to become like Him.  It’s true that following Him can be painful, but it’s only in conforming our lives to His and ourselves to Him that we can ever truly come to know what love is.  Pain can make us saints…if we’ll let it.

My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son….God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it (Heb 12:5-6, 11)

Did you miss Part I of this post?  See: Why Does God Allow Suffering?

Part III: Letting the Pain Mold Us: Putting God’s Will Above Our Own

Why Does God Allow Suffering?

Suffering and pain are probably the most confusing part of life.  C.S. Lewis calls them God’s megaphones, which I think is an apt metaphor because nothing gets and keeps our attention quite like them.  Nothing makes us to think about God more than pain, leading to one inevitable question: why?

The problem of pain has been coming up a lot and so I want to devote a few posts to it, though by no means will they be exhaustive.  Pain is such a mystery, and yet some kind of understanding of why God allows it is paramount if we’re ever to trust and love Him.

Perhaps one of the most instructive passages in the Old Testament about suffering comes from Exodus, chapter 5. Scholars debate about how long exactly the Israelites were slaves to the Egyptians, but it was a long time (200-450 years).  And it was hard labor: “So [the Egyptians] made the people of Israel serve with rigor, and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field; in all their work they made them serve with rigor” (Ex 1:13-14).  This means that there were some Israelites who lived and died in bondage, spending their wholes lives in miserable service to a foreign ruler.  How could a faithful and loving God allow that?

Then when God finally acts, what does He tells Moses to ask the Pharaoh?  Does God command the Pharaoh to free the Israelites?  No!  That only comes later.  The first request Moses makes to the Pharaoh is simply a three day break so they can go into the wilderness and worship God (5:1).  This reveals a hard and steadfast truth: God always cares more about our spiritual welfare than our physical welfare.

Notice I say He cares more.  It’s not like God doesn’t care about our physical well being.  God knows when we suffer, just like He heard the Israelites “groaning” in Egypt (Ex 2:24).  But spiritual well being has to come first.  The Israelites had stopped worshipping the one true God, and idolatry had to be addressed before slavery.

Likewise, God sometimes uses pain to focus our attention on our own spiritual welfare.  It’s so easy to get complacent, to start living our lives for ourselves instead of for Him, to begin subtly worshipping things instead of God.  Sometimes pain is God’s last resort, His way of grabbing us by the shoulders and turning us back toward Him.  Sometimes pain is God’s way of pulling us closer to Him, helping us to lean on and trust Him in ways we never thought possible.

Pain has to be viewed in light of the purpose for which we were created: to have eternal union with God in Heaven.  Everything, yes everything, that happens to us is allowed only because God knows it can move us closer to that one, all-important end.  There is perhaps no truer expression of our love for God than to say: This hurts, and I want it to stop, but I trust You.  And if pain is the only way I can get closer to You right now, the only way I can better recognize how completely dependent I am on You, the only way you can purify my heart and mind so that You are what I seek above all else, the only way I can come to understand that Your love for me is far greater than I ever imagined, then I choose You over an end to the pain.

I’ve always liked the analogy of surgery you didn’t know you needed.  Suddenly waking up in the middle of open-heart surgery and looking around, you’d 1) be in ridiculous amounts of pain, 2) think everything was horribly wrong, 3) in that moment, with your chest cracked wide open and blood everywhere, wonder how the surgery you were sure you didn’t need could possibly be in your best interest.  It’s only after the surgery, that you would come to understand it was an act of love, intended for restoration and true health.  Pain is like that.  We never want it, but we often need the good things that can come out of that pain.  And God, the Great Healer, always desires both our physical and spiritual health.  But like any good Father, He puts our eternal well being before our temporal.

See Part II of this post: How Pain Teaches Us To Love Like God

The Problem of Pain (and Suffering)

Suffering is such an important issue for everyone (since no one can escape it) and yet how poorly we understand it, and all too often, how poorly we respond to it.  Sometimes when we suffer we feel God’s presence and run to Him.  But it’s more common that when we suffer we feel alone.  Even if we know that God is with us, we sometimes still feel like He isn’t with us the way we need or want Him to be.  There may be moments of respite where we rest in Him, feeling loved and peaceful, but they seem all too fleeting when the pain and confusion and fear return.

Suffering brings to the forefront the choice we are making every day: do we choose to trust God or to turn away from Him?  When we’re in pain this choice can’t simply be answered by autopilot (as it often is during our daily lives).  Pain is like a megaphone that blares the question into our ears, forcing us decide.  And after we do decide, we are asked repeatedly until the pain goes away.  That’s one of the reasons suffering is so difficult: we have to consciously make the choice to trust in God, hour after hour, over and over again, even in those moments when we feel like He’s not helping or that He’s not there.

And we all know it’s not easy to do.  The pain can wear us down.  It can make us feel isolated, abandoned.  It can make us question the reasons we have for hope.  And while I would love to offer wonderful words of wisdom that would comfort all who are suffering, I am nowhere near holy enough to do so.  But I can offer one better: the words of our Mother Mary, as received by Anne the lay apostle:

My poor little child, how you suffer. There are times when suffering is so great that a little one cannot even feel the comfort that is lavished upon them. It is this way for you now. In your grief, you stagger, but you are supported. I know that you do not always feel this support. We accept this. Later, when you come to heaven, you will marvel at the generosity of heaven as you understand the great lengths heaven went to in order to support you through this tragedy.

We are never alone.  We are never forgotten about.  We are loved each and every second.  May the consolations heaven is showering on us at this moment give us the strength to rest in the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

See also: Do Suffering and Pain Have Meaning?