Kim and I pray together every night before we go to bed. We pray over our family and our personal needs and over friends that are going through hard times, such health issues or interpersonal struggles or financial difficulty. And it seems that lately our prayer list has grown. I don’t think that means anything. Life is not harder now than before. And I don’t think that we have become more aware of people’s hurts and pains. I’m probably just as self-focused now as I ever have been. But no matter, we have a large list of hurting people that we lift up to the Lord in prayer.

And it seems to never end.

In other words, there are always people and situations that need prayer. People will drop off our list because God addresses their situation, and then we will hear about others and will add them to our list. Suffering, hard times, difficulty—these things are far more normal than any of us would like to admit. We tend to think of suffering as something abnormal, something out of the ordinary. And when we do, we don’t react well to it. We become surprised by it. It catches us off guard. And then we respond to it that way. We expect to treat suffering the way we treat a headache. Take a couple of Tylenol and it will go away in a couple of hours.

But suffering isn’t like that. It is the context in which we live. It is the stuff of life. Years ago, the cotton industry had an ad campaign that said that cotton was “the fabric of our lives.” In reality, suffering is the fabric of our lives. We don’t live in a good world where hard times simply intrude. We live in a bad world where hard times are the norm. Now in saying that we live in a bad world, I’m not saying that our lives, and this world, is as bad as it could be. It is not. And there are certainly wonderful gifts and blessings to enjoy. But, this is a bad world. It is. It is not as it was meant to be. And the fact that I feel the need to explain and defend that statement is evidence that we have grown so accustomed to this bad world that it doesn’t feel all that bad.

And when the world, and our lives and our relationships, don’t feel that bad, we reduce the glory and joy and beauty of heaven. Thinking of this idea brings me to a passage in 2 Corinthians. Look at verses 16-18 of chapter 4. “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

First, Paul tells us not to lose heart. Now why does he say that? He says that because he knows that we live in a bad world. Life is hard, and he knows it. In previous verses, he says that we are afflicted in every way, that we are perplexed and persecuted and struck down, that we are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake (vss. 8-11). This does not describe a life of comfort and convenience. And we are “jars of clay” (v. 7)—common, mundane, not much to look at, probably chipped or cracked.

But it doesn’t matter, or at least it shouldn’t. Even though we live in a bad world and we are only common clay pots, “our inner self is being renewed” every day. You see, every hardship, every difficulty, every instance of suffering is being used by God to renew our inner self. Then the apostle Paul says some quite arresting things about suffering. First, he calls it light. Light! Paul says suffering is light. Folks, that means this. Cancer is light. I don’t want to believe that. Cancer doesn’t seem light. There are too folks on my prayer list with cancer, some of them young, too young. Cancer seems deep and dark and ominous. It seems like a death-sentence. But the Bible says that cancer is light. Job loss and financial hardship is light. I don’t want to believe that either. We have several folks on our prayer list who don’t have jobs or need better jobs. One person on our list had a hospital stay while he didn’t have a job, and thus no health insurance, and now he has medical bills that seem insurmountable. That doesn’t seem light to me. That seems big and heavy and hard. Depression is light. We are also praying for a dear friend who is suffering with depression. It is hard to believe the Bible when it calls depression light. Depression is anything but light. Depression is, in fact, dark and black and heavy. It feels like an anchor on your spirit. It drags you down, down to places where there is no light, places that feel like a grave.

Paul also calls our suffering momentary. Momentary? That doesn’t seem real either. It seems preposterous, even laughable, to call suffering momentary when medical treatments go on and on and on, when you are without work and all you get in the mail are “thanks but no thanks” letters, when days of discouragement continue one after another like the pages on a calendar.

Folks, God says that suffering is light and momentary. But the only way to really believe that, especially when you are in the middle of it, is to compare it to eternity. That’s what the apostle Paul does. He tells us to “look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.” Folks, that is the only way to view suffering without it caving in on top of you. When you look at death and disease, fears and failures, tragedy and loss and betrayal, in light of eternity, in light of that which is unseen, then, yes, suffering is light and momentary.

But maybe the most astounding thing that the apostle says here is that suffering has a purpose. God is using it. He is using it to “prepare for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” God is using every instance of suffering—every sickness, every disease, every financial hardship, every dark day—to prepare for us, and to prepare us for, heaven. God is using affliction, light and momentary, to produce in us glory. Suffering is not meaningless. It is purposeful. God uses it the way a sculptor uses a particular tool to push and move and fashion the clay into the work of art that he has in mind.

And look how the apostle describes that glory. It is weighty. It is not light and fluffy and blown away by the first wind that comes along. It is solid and firm, made of bricks and not straw. It is beyond all comparison. This is crucial. When we are in the middle of suffering, we must compare it. We must compare it to the everlasting joys of eternity. And when we do, we will find that it is beyond all comparison. When cancer seems big and job loss seems big and depression seems big, then the glory of heaven must be bigger, and better and more beautiful and more glorious and more astounding. When suffering threatens to overwhelm us, we must be more overwhelmed by heaven. And finally, it is eternal. This is the best. Suffering is light and momentary, but glory is eternal.

The only way to keep suffering from undoing us is to view it in light of heaven, in light of the things that are unseen.