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(OPINION) Earlier this month, I wrote a Q&A piece in which I interviewed Jon Weece, the lead pastor of Central Kentucky’s Southland Christian Church. As is typical with such articles, for reasons of space I omitted much of our conversation.

Since then, I’ve realized that what stuck with me most is something I left out.

I lead a tiny congregation, yet even I sometimes find myself emotionally battered by my pastoral duties.

As a minister, you’re something of a spiritual first-responder. When people get that terminal diagnosis, those divorce papers, that layoff notice, you’re among their first calls.

Watching so many friends suffer so much heartache across so many years has been hard.

Weece leads 14,000 people. I can’t fathom what toll that would take on him. So I asked him about it.

“My phone just dings all day long with sadness, and tragedy, and heartache,” he said. “But I signed up for that. I love people. And I think the common language of humanity is suffering. We’re all fluent in the language of pain.”

Those last two sentences have stayed in my head: The common language of humanity is suffering. We’re all fluent in the language of pain.

That’s Truth, my friends, with a capital T.

This column isn’t about Weece, though. It’s about suffering.

Just this morning, I learned a close friend has been diagnosed with a rare, incurable and potentially dangerous autoimmune disease. Another friend learned a week or two ago she has lupus, this while caregiving her disabled husband. A relative and church member is this moment in the last throes of COPD, not expected to survive the day.

If the suffering among my friends, parishioners and kin weren’t enough, I think about the war in Ukraine. And the one in Gaza. And the one in Congo. Babies slaughtered. Women raped. Hospitals pounded to rubble. People displaced. Societies collapsing.

Suffering indeed is our common language. Regardless of your age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, politics or marital status, every person reading this column has suffered. If somehow you haven’t yet, you will.

This may be the greatest impediment to believing in a loving, all-powerful God. From the beginning people have cried, “If God exists, why doesn’t he stop this pain?”

The Old Testament includes a whole book devoted to that one question: Job. And its confounding solution is to offer no answer at all. God is God, and you’re not, it says. There may be a reason why you’re suffering, but you wouldn’t understand it even if you were told.

Thanks, biblical scribe. That clears everything right up. I feel all better.

Christians have spent two millennia trying to formulate their own answers for this dark mystery. We haven’t had great success, either.

Jesus had the best approach (not surprisingly). He seemed not to deliberate overly on the causes of suffering. He viewed pain as an unavoidable condition of life here on earth. For the time being, suffering is built into the fabric of our universe.

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel. “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

The idea, I think, was that we should not allow our difficulties to shut our hearts and steal our faith. Instead, our pain and setbacks, no matter how unfair they might be, can be employed for the opposite purpose: to help mold us into better people and help us depend on the Lord.

Reflecting this idea, Thomas Merton wrote: “The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.”

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain,” the Catholic contemplative Richard Rohr has said.

The long-term benefits of suffering can be myriad.

Pain teaches us empathy and compassion for others who are hurting. Suffering strips us of the self-delusion of imagining that money, beauty, titles and fame matter; it’s impossible to care about such baubles when we’re fighting just to draw another breath. As we fail, wail and arrive at the raw end of ourselves, we may discover amid our misery a counterintuitive peace and, paradoxically, even a type of joy.

This Christian view of suffering (which is quite similar to the Buddhist view, by the way) encourages us not to run from it but to accept it, to bow to it humbly as if greeting not exactly a friend but a wise teacher.

“The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer,” Merton said.

But of course I write these lofty spiritual observations knowing full well, knowing intimately, how impossible they are to practice. All suffering is by definition unpleasant. Some suffering is truly awful — death can look like a relief.

In the main, we suffer without discovering great truths. We writhe and moan. We shake our fists at the silent sky. We pity ourselves. Then, somewhere along the line, wrung out, we collapse into the arms of the Lord. We hope. We despair again. We hope some more.

We eventually emerge from this difficulty. We forget it.

Then we do it all again next time. Because we’re human. Because this is the world we’ve been given.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.