Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

  • The pursuit of ease and personal gain in this life prevents one from enjoying the presence of God and blinds his eyes from seeing Christ because it rather fixes his attention on himself.

    Imperfect Love: Struggling to Love Like God
    Hilana Said

  • Your past and present torments and sufferings are poured down upon you to test your faith and steel it; they also work to curb your lusts and passions. Humble yourself. God succours the humble. Judgment of others, insistence on their shortcomings, can only increase the bitterness of your sorrow. Choose the better part.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • …you should know the prophecy of the ancient Fathers, that in the last times monastics will be saved not through spiritual exploits, but through the endurance of sorrows. To such an extent is this true and needful that the surest sign of God’s favor and God’s love for a person is the multitude of sorrows and sick­nesses which befall him.

    —Abbot Nikon Vorobiev

  • When we become unduly distressed at falling ill, we should recognize that our soul is still the slave of bodily desires and so longs for physical health, not wishing to lose the good things of this life and even finding it a great hardship not to be able to enjoy them because of illness. If, however, the soul accepts thankfully the pains of illness, it is clear that it is not far from the realm of dispassion; as a result it even waits joyfully for death as the entry into a life that is more true.

    —St. Diadochus

  • But if we looked to the tribulation through a perspective that is heavenly, eternal, we would see the tribulation as it really is: light and transient. And as our teacher Pope Shenouda III said, “It is bound to end. It is all for the good.”

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Pray

  • FOR all the long years of this present life disappear when you have regard to the eternity of the future glory: and all our sorrows vanish away in the contemplation of that vast bliss, and like smoke melt away, and come to nothing, and like ashes are no more seen.

    John Cassian, Institutes
    CHAPTER XII: That no toil is worthy to be compared with the promised bliss. 

  • ‘Sometimes seeing their fault distresses them more than the thing that disturbs them, for unable to help themselves they are affected by earthly happenings even though these may not be very burdensome.’

    —Teresa of Ávila

  • “Don’t say why me? Say why not me?“

    —Fr. Benjamin Girgis

  • “I’m the last thing tethering you to reality, yet your only way of escaping it.”

    I’m a Short Afternoon Walk and You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure on Me

  • “A sick man only wants one thing, a healthy man wants 10,000 things.”

    —Confucius