Jesus came so that we could have life and have it abundantly, but before we start preaching health and wealth we need to remember He also told us it would came prepackaged with a world of hurt. Abundance is generally thought of as affluence and wealth but is it possible that it also includes pain and suffering?

In A Grace Disguised, Jerry Sittser helps us understand how tragedy can expand our ability to experience life more abundantly.

Sorrow is noble and gracious. It enlarges the soul until the soul is capable of mourning and rejoicing simultaneously, of feeling the world’s pain and hoping for the world’s healing at the same time. However painful, sorrow is good for the soul … What I once considered mutually exclusive – sorrow and joy, pain and pleasure, death and life – have become parts of a greater whole. My soul has been stretched.

If you truly want to experience God’s overflowing abundance you must make room for it by allowing your soul to be stretched. The groans you utter as it uncomfortably expands may temporarily drown out the singing in heaven, but in the end will create an earthly space with far better salvation acoustics.

Jesus’ life could hardly be considered abundant by modern cultural standards but through suffering His soul was stretched to globally salvific proportions. His pain made room for our pain and His abundant life became our abundant life. Maybe we would let the belt out on our souls a bit more if we truly believed that soul stretching could be soul saving.

Has a Big Bang of pain expanded your souls universe or left you a cold selfish Singularity? Have you allowed your soul to be buried alive under hoarded material “blessings” or free to dig through the suffering of others and exhume them to new life? Historically, Christianity has expanded whenever it experienced tribulation and contracted when it became culturally comfortable. If the church wants to experience God’s abundance it must not become an exclusive country club for the well heeled, but a county hospital for sinners that always has room for one more gurney.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort. (2 Cor 1: 3-7)