I don't know if this is an old thread or if this would even help or not, but I sending it out.
Perhaps part of the issue, and something that I have been going through recently, is the issue of what the world tells us is important and trying to live up to those expectations. If you read more of the fathers you begin to understand that jobs, success, independance, and even health (something hard for me to get through) does not matter like we think it does. The world wants us to focus on these things.....because we can NEVER achieve them! In the constant running after them, we never focus on what is most important, and in the end we miss the mark and we never heal from the inside out.
I'll give you an example I saw with my own eyes.....
I had a friend, she was successful, a professor at an Ivy league school. Intelligent, beautiful and captivating, she excelled in everything. She was born Orthodox, but left the church when she got more into the reason and science based crowd. When she was 31 she got very sick and found out she had a quickly spreading cancer. She told me once, \"I tried everything to understand why I had cancer. I looked throughout the world to find the cure, the answer for why I was suffering. But I never found it and I got very angry and depressed.\" Her colleagues left her, she had to quit her job, her beauty was eaten away by the cancer. She could no longer visit friends, or even go for walks because she would get too tired.
Then she met a friend of mine who invited her back to the church. She came with her husband (where I met her for the first time) at a Pascha service.) She met our priest and they became good friends quickly and she began to read the fathers and books like \"The Reason for Suffering.\" And her inner life changed.
When I got to sit down with her, only once mind you, she immediately told me about her life before and now....
\"I used to really hate myself. I had everything yes, but really deep down I was sick. I was constantly chasing the world, another paper needed to be written, another bill paid, another workload, and another and another....reaching for what? Success? What is this? Running running running.\" She talked about getting sick and reading the spiritual books on suffering..
\"My eyes opened. Now believe it or not, I have joy. Ever pain is a joy to me. Why? Because now I understand what is important. I know now that it was given to me, to open my eyes to what life really is. God gives us these things not as punishments (like the world says) but to get us closer to Him, to open our eyes. To give us compassion. To heal our soul. To help us love the unfortunate. To help us understand how they suffer. To get us closer to Him, to help us push away everything that distracts us, that keeps us chasing the world.\"
\"You know, before I really was deep down very hateful, prideful, ungrateful. Now I feel God is helping me to realize these things and with his grace I am healing those things that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. Now I have joy! Peace! Love! Oh how I love everything! I have time for prayer! To love every face I see! To even love myself.\"
Needless to say, she became a saint to all if us. And as her cancer got worse, I swear to you, her love poured out more. She never complained (even when they cemented her back and she was in great pain) and she never became angry or hateful. She came every Sunday, even when her husband had to carry her, for communion.
When she died, her husband told me, \"Don't worry about her my dear! I have never been a religious man, but she proved to me that we have souls.\"
I heard later that on the night and morning of her death, she had been unconscious for days, but when our priest came to serve her communion one last time, she fully woke up, and talked with him and took communion. The next morning as her husband knelt by her side, he had a vision of her, and she said to him, \"It's alright. Its time for me to go.\" Her death was peaceful, even the nurse said it was the most peaceful death she had ever seen.
From the time she first realized she had cancer, she lived only 1 year and got to see only one Pascha. Most of us only knew her, 1 year, but she now stays with us for our lives as a witness of what suffering can achieve when it is used to heal your soul. She as 32.
Perhaps this doesn't give you any answers, perhaps it does, but either way, I wanted you and others to know it...because it happened only a few years ago. Everytime I think about it, I suffer because I realize how little I have learned and how much I complain and use this life for nothing but myself.
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