Don't Waste your Pain

Excerpted from Deeper by Fr. Bob McConaghy

When you're broadsided by life, when you're in your Good Friday, when

you're feeling any kind of pain—emotional or physical—the message is, "Don't waste your pain."

We are Christians, not masochists. We don't look for pain, and God doesn't give us crosses.
It's  people who give us crosses. Life give us crosses. The LRT gives us crosses.
EDSA gives us crosses.

God does not send crosses to punish us. We punish ourselves. When He gives us mercy 

in the sacrament of penance and we leave still feeling guilty, why do we do this?

Because we feel as though we need to be punished. 

When Jesus died on the cross on Good Friday, He said, "No more punishment. 

When I forgive you, you're justified just as if you've never sinned, just as if

you've never done that. Lay the burden down. Stop beating yourself up, but take up

your cross daily and follow Me."

Don't waste your pain. It can be redemptive for others. Look how redemptive

it was through the life of Renee. It was the same for the parishioners who

witnessed George's sacrife. Jesus sends powerful actual graces when we unite

whatever pain we have with His ongoing sacrifice to the Father.

Maybe someone you know is at the moment of death and they're scared of God 

or they don't believe in Him. What you can do is take whatever discomfort you're
experiencing at the moment and pray the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy, the most
powerful  prayer you can pray for someone who is dying. Or maybe you can dedicate
the next twenty minutes of your pain for the nurses, doctors, and healers of the hospital

where that person is. This is a way to become significant in that particular situation.

Nobody else might notice but Jesus does. 

When Jesus walked around Galilee during His three years of ministry, He always 

noticed people whom nobody else noticed. He stopped and He touched them.
He touched the leper even if it was against the law. He turned things upside down.

Then He did the most beautifully significant thing of all time: He gave Himself for us.

What was a failure in the eyes of the world that didn't believe became the

very act that would save all men.

On Good Friday, don't settle for what you think you deserve because of your sins.

Rather experience what grace delivers to you as you pick up your cross each day.