I lost my job when COVID hit. My wife and I had just settled on plans to save for a house, finally settled into our first apartment, and had just found out our first child was on the way.

One thing led to another and our savings slowly slipped away with what felt like our dreams.

I remember asking a lot of questions: What did I do wrong? When should I look for a new job? How will I feed my family? Why me? 

These questions were all self-centred.

Suffering closes us; it makes it hard to look outside of our immediate experience.

Despite the fact that all this pain impacted my wife as much as it impacted me, I got caught up in my own sense of what was wrong. Somewhere amid the feelings of worry and despair I realized I needed to do something or I was going to fail a lot more people than just myself.

I went looking for solutions in all the usual places: economic gurus, fitness influencers, self-help books, the imposing face of Jordan Peterson telling me to “clean my room,” my mom.

None of it really helped. Well, maybe my mom, just a little.

Even staring up at the sky, demanding an explanation from the universe – that tried-and-true existential cope embraced by such diverse visionaries as Nietzsche and Charlie Brown – quickly lost its cathartic mojo. The stars were silent: God clearly wanted more from me than my son’s response to bedtime. 

But what did he want? 

Honestly, at the time I don’t think I really wanted the answer. If I had, the Bible, Church, a priest, or any of the dozens of spiritual classics would have been listed above with the hoi polloi of everyday mental health advice.

This is probably because the Bible rarely offers comfortable solutions to our problems.

And in this case, I got less of a solution and more of a challenge: to rejoice in hard times and embrace the suffering that had come my way.

This sort of thing is hard to hear at the best of times. But even now, as we continue living with COVID and the plethora of suffering in the world, I think I have a better understanding of what it actually means. 

This idea comes from one of St. Paul’s letters, where he says that Christians “rejoice in [their] suffering.” (Rom 5:3) Because the quotation usually stops there, it often feels unhelpful.

What St. Paul is really saying is that we should rejoice in our suffering because it produces “endurance” and “character,” and thus hope. In short, it produces virtue. 

He goes on to say that “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”

St. Paul is not so much telling us to revel in our problems – I wasn’t supposed to start cheering about job loss – but to meet them head on and embrace them with a radical acceptance.

When we experience suffering we should find solace and joy in the reality that God is with us in the struggle; like a good father, he holds our hand and encourages us through the hardship.

Suffering isn’t a pointless climb, instead it makes us like hikers struggling towards a peak with a beautiful view.

This message is difficult because it seems contrary to human nature. When bad things happen to me, I start to shut other people out – or worse I seek out people who will affirm my dysfunction. I want to be told that life sucks and that I should be angry about whatever has happened. 

I grow moody and resentful of God, and of other people who don’t have my problems. I become self-obsessed. 

Anyone who has gone through hard times can probably relate to this. We don’t like to be around people who don’t reciprocate our emotions, be they positive or negative. This is why misery loves company, and why to someone who is depressed a smile can sometimes feel like a slap in the face. In our inward cycle, we become attached to the feeling that someone or something has done us wrong and it becomes a vicious cycle. 

What St. Paul is telling us is that we can break out of that cycle by trusting and hoping in God. In his writings, Pope Benedict XVI was fond of saying that we become most authentically ourselves when we are willing to trust God and let go of the anxiety and the concerns that weigh us down.

I never got my job back. At the advice of my wife I decided to pursue writing, and my old boss was able to hire someone who needed the work far more than I ever did. Our dream of owning a house has been replaced by a desire to live in a closer relationship with family. And having less money made us lean on the people who cared about us, helping us develop some much-needed humility while strengthening our marriage and community. 

Paradoxically, the solution to my suffering wasn’t to find a solution to my suffering.

Rather, it was to hope and trust in the goodness and promises of God that things would work out; and they did – just not in any way that I could have possibly imagined.