Endurance

Endurance is essential. Endurance is more important than survival. One must endure regardless of physical death, which will come sometime, anyway. One must endure in life and in death, through death. Pray for endurance. God's will is that we endure. Holy endurance.

A friend sent the Ploys of Satan. These ploys up-end endurance. Look out for doubt, discouragement, diversion, defeat, and delay. Doubt brings us to question God's Word, forgiveness, goodness and love. Discouragement causes self-focus on problems rather than entrusting self and problems to God. Diversion tempts us to find the wrong things more attractive than desire for the right things. Defeat convinces us we are failures. Why bother trying? Delay stops us short in accomplishments; procrastinate so things don't get done.

Endurance supersedes these ploys. One must desire endurance, holy endurance. Desire it because endurance is more than a noun standing on either side of a verb. Endurance is a quality, a gift, an essential of existence. Endure in Christ.

I believe I've commented in recent suffering that I came to know three things. Suffering = the Eucharist; the Eucharist = suffering; and Catholicism is my last and only hope.

More on suffering = the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. A consecrated Host is the gift of Jesus of Himself to those who believe and commit to this belief. It is a Catholic belief, based upon Christ's actions and words at the Last Supper. The Eucharist lives on from that night about 2000 years ago. Jesus explains it fully, also, as recorded in John 6. Hoards of books describe Eucharistic miracles. Slews of mystics and saints have written of Eucharistic realities in diaries which they had no idea would ever be published. They had no material agenda. It is amazing that so many people have not heard of these books, these miracles, these saints and mystics--nor have they read about the Eucharist in books or the Book.

I have been grappling with love of suffering. I admit that I hit a stumbling block and couldn't seem to break through, although I knew it necessary to move beyond suffering, offering suffering to Jesus, offering suffering to Jesus in reparation for my sins and the sins of others--to offering suffering in love and joy to Jesus in reparation for my sins and the sins of others in redemptive collusion with His sacrifice for us all. I have prayed for the gift to love suffering.

Now the key to the suffering keyhole is in my hand, and I place it in that keyhole which will unlock the door to the room of love of suffering and redemptive sacrifice. The key is that suffering = the Eucharist and the Eucharist = suffering. Thus, suffering = Jesus Christ since Jesus Christ is the Eucharist. This is His Body and Blood, and thus if I love Jesus, I love the Eucharist. If I love the Eucharist, I love the suffering He embodies within that small, simple, consecrated Host.

This morning at Mass, for the first time, I received the Eucharist in a new illumination of love. I consumed the suffering Jesus with love, and thus I loved the suffering Jesus offers within Himself. I think this is the key to love of suffering. Awareness of the key makes a difference for endurance and in burying doubt, discouragement, diversion, defeat, and delay.