Our spiritual awareness is not necessarily accurate when we reflect on our spiritual life as valleys and mountaintops. Such a description invokes our emotional climate. Rather, if we were to focus our attention skyward, and skyward alone, our position high or low would not affect our perception. Let our eyes remain vertical so that the horizontal will be seen more truly.
The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
If suffering ceases to be supernatural, it becomes ours for which we have no cure. We tear it out of the heavenly and throw mud on it. It heals temporarily only to boil moments later. It makes a wedge between man and God. When we give it back to the God (the supernatural), it unites us to Him and our understanding of deliverance is restored. Thankfully we are sealed with the holy spirit and united with God for eternity, but we tend to lose sight of reality in lieu of our desires.
Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality.
If we would tune into God's prompting each and every moment of every day, our sense of reality would be flawlessly joyful. However, our flesh weighs us down and we have to struggle through physical, spiritual, emotional warfare on all fronts, all the time. The mystery of His distance draws us nearer, but it is only through our uninterrupted attention that we would be joyful always...Pick up your cross daily...
Thus the better we are able to conceive of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction and our compassion for others. What does suffering take from him who is without joy?
This statement implies that pure suffering may only take place when we are conscious to the fullness of joy found within it. Otherwise our suffering is empty and we can only move downard, where our perception of reality enters into the imaginary (where we believe our suffering is meaningless).
And if we conceive the fullness of joy, suffering is still to joy what hunger is to food.
Just as food is, hunger will forever draw us there. Similarly, Joy is, and suffering is a provision that draws us there also. There being in its only form pure joy, which is supernatural; drawing also into reality.
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