For My Sake

“Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” (Matthew 5:11-12). Whether we are a sinner or a saint, whether we are kind or cruel, likable or detestable, we are all of us going to be reviled and persecuted and have all manner of evil spoken (falsely or not) against us. If it is coming to us anyway, no matter how little or how hard we try to avoid it, then we have a choice. We can let the pain break and drag us down and let the fear swallow us up until we disappear into a tiny speck of traumatized nothingness. Or, we can suffer for a reason. We can suffer for Christ’s sake and in so doing, we can rejoice and be exceedingly glad. When a parent is up until four in the morning setting up for Christmas morning and then gets dragged out of bed less than an hour later they are suffering acutely from fatigue and sleep loss. But they are suffering for their children’s sake, and when they see the excitement on their faces, they can rejoice and be exceedingly glad. When a spouse allows the love of their life to drag them off to a monster truck rally or the opera or skydiving, they may suffer acutely from sensory overload or boredom or sheer terror, but when they see the look of pure joy on their spouses faces as they are doing the thing they love most with the one they love the most, they rejoice and are exceedingly glad. When we leave this mortal life behind, all of our pains and sorrows will fade away from our memories, but we will cherish and carry with us every memory of every bright and shining smile that we bought with our suffering for the sake of those we love. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ all will be made right in the end, but we don’t have to wait until the hereafter to bring meaning to our suffering and to rejoice and be exceedingly glad. When we love our Savior, when we would do anything for Him, just like we would do anything, including surviving off of no sleep or going to some dreaded event that we could never understand in a million years, to put a smile on the faces of those we love, then we can let our love and our joy and our exceeding gladness cast off our pain and our sorrows because we are not just suffering needlessly but we are suffering for Christ’s sake.