The Suffering We Choose

There is suffering that arrives uninvited, and there is suffering we choose. This second category confuses us, because we have been taught — rightly — that God does not delight in our pain. But Jesus is explicit: following Him involves a cross-carrying, self-denying movement that is not comfortable and is not accidental.

Denying self does not mean hating yourself or ignoring your needs. It means releasing the sovereignty of the self — the belief that my preferences, my timeline, my comfort, and my plans are the primary ordering principle of my life. It means the self is no longer on the throne.

This is relevant to peace because most of our chaos is, at least partly, a result of the self demanding what it wants and being refused. We want circumstances to be different than they are. We want God to move on our schedule. We want outcomes we have not received. And the friction between what we demand and what is actual produces enormous internal noise.

The cross-carrying life does not remove this friction by giving us everything we want. It removes it by transforming what we want — slowly, painfully, genuinely. The person who has genuinely submitted their will to God's is not destroyed; they are freed. Freed from the exhausting obligation of making the universe conform to their preferences.

This is not passive resignation. It is an active, daily, chosen dying — and the paradox of the Christian life is that this dying is where resurrection begins. The peace that follows surrender is not the peace of defeat. It is the peace of coming home.