Redemptive Suffering in an Age of Comfort

Everyone suffers. Almost no one knows what to do with it.

When pain comes, most of us ask why it is happening. The answer rarely arrives, and even when it does, it does not take the pain away. There is a better question, and this one has an answer: what do we do with our suffering now that it is here?

Our culture of comfort doesn't have an answer, but the Church has had one for two thousand years. It is called redemptive suffering, and most of us were never taught it.

In Redemptive Suffering in an Age of Comfort, Jeff Krohn draws on Scripture, the witness of the saints, and the teaching of Pope St. John Paul II, especially his apostolic letter Salvifici Doloris, to offer a clear and compassionate guide to suffering well. He writes not as a scholar but as a witness. At forty-eight he was diagnosed with cancer, and in the years that followed he learned what it means to offer up pain and unite it to Christ.

This book makes no promise to lift your cross or explain it away. It offers no easy answers and no sentimental comfort. What it offers instead is a choice: to carry your pain alone, or to unite it to Christ and let it become love and intercession for others.

Inside this book:

• What "offer it up" means, and how to live it
• What the Cross changed about suffering, and what that means for yours
• How to keep going when God feels far away and your feelings do not match your faith
• Practical prayer methods and a guide to confession to put it all into practice

For anyone walking through illness, grief, loss, depression, or the long quiet exhaustion of ordinary life, this book shows how even the hardest parts of life, when united to Christ, can draw us into deeper communion with Him and let our lives share in His saving work for the world.

Jesus never said suffering would be easy. He said it would be worth it.