Are you ready to be disciplined by God?

Endure your trials as “discipline” (Hebrews 12:7).

Accept your problems as lessons for life. I can make sense of this in my head. I can even point to an analogy: The child who gets burned learns how to be careful with fire. But what if you are that child getting burned? It is harder to grasp this when you are the one currently being tried. It is easy to say the words of Hebrew 12:7 until you have to swallow them.

Endure your trials as “discipline.” As I prepared myself to serve in the Philippine General Hospital as a chaplain, this was one of the verses I thought I could keep in my back pocket. But face to face with the patients and their loved ones, I could never whip it out. It just stayed there, burning a hole in my back pocket and in my mind. How could I ever say this to people suffering great pain?

It gets worse when you read the other verses of today’s second reading: “Whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every child he acknowledges... God treats you as his children. And what ‘child’ is there whom a father does not discipline?” I can understand how a slap on the wrist can be instructive, but what kind of God would teach us with cancer? Or a newborn baby dying a few minutes after birth, cradled in the arms of a mother who had carried such great hope the past nine months? Or an undiagnosable illness that just lingers on and on, burdening not just a patient but his whole family? A father will never do this. What kind of God can?

Endure your trials as “discipline.” Where arguments fail, the witness of real people can succeed. I recently met a lady who has dedicated her life to serving the poor. We were in a Scripture class together, and she really applied the words of the Bible to her own situation — talagang personalan, walang “trabaho lang,” as Scripture is supposed to be read. We went through Exodus, and she saw how plagues had also ravaged her life: She was imprisoned during the Marcos years. Her marriage failed. Her firstborn son died shortly before his third birthday. But she also how all these were somehow bringing her to the Promised Land.

In Exodus, the plagues were never meant just to punish the Egyptians.

In the narrative, one can see that they were supposed to prove who the real God was. For example, when God turned the waters of the Nile into blood, it was a challenge to Apis, Isis, and Khnum, the gods the Egyptians believed guarded their great river. In the same way, this lady somehow saw all her “plagues” slowly leading her not only to know more about God but to know God more.

What God did she discover? Not a cruel, heartless teacher, but a God who journeyed with her through her deserts, protected her, and fed her with manna. Coming home from a vacation, she and her companions were ambushed. Her car was riddled with bullets, but the real riddle was how she was able to survive. Interrogated in prison, she could have been tortured many times, but something would always mysteriously happen to keep her safe. While her son could never be replaced nor forgotten, she was blessed in her grief with a daughter whose love now sustains her.

I hope I never forget the way this lady told us her story. One would understand if she had cried while recounting her ordeals or at least become misty-eyed. But there was actually a certain lift in her voice — she was excited to share with us the God who had been teaching her.

Endure your trials as “discipline.” But trials can make one angry with

God. How can one go through the plagues of one’s life without becoming bitter?

Endure your trials as “discipline.” I do not think you can really say this to convince another person. You can only say this to yourself.

But how can you truly believe it?

Endure your trials as “discipline.” Maybe you can only say this from hindsight, not when you are actually going through your trials. But how can you hold on until you come out the other end of the tunnel?

In the end, it is a matter of faith. It is only with faith that one can say, “Endure your trials as ‘discipline’” — faith in a God who does not want to destroy you but wants you to know you are his child, faith in a God who goes through your trials with you, faith in a God who promises us it will not end with just these trials. It will end with something better than we could have ever imagined. “Blind faith,” the clever ones will say, rolling their eyes. But the truly wise will look up and say, “Faith that sees in a different way. Faith that sees what others cannot.”

Maybe this is part of the narrow gate Jesus talks about in our Gospel today. Not everyone will be strong enough to enter it. But perhaps, seeing how we have been able to survive our past trials can make us a bit stronger. We may be scarred, we may be limping, but still we have been able to come out the other side. Can we see that we would not have been able to if we were alone? Can we see that the God who surely walked with us, squeezed through the narrow gate himself with us, and now invites us to something better than what we left behind?

I usually do not reveal the names of the people whose stories I share.

But I asked the permission of this lady who has made me doubt and who has made me hope. I think it is part of her story and part of her message. It is what happens when we, with faith, endure our trials.

Her name is Resurreccion.