If Affliction Is a Price… What Does It Purchase?

I believe that many people think about suffering in a way that deserves to be reconsidered.

We rarely say it out loud, but most of us instinctively treat suffering as interruption. Something that has gone wrong. Something to escape—even to avoid at all costs. When affliction enters our lives, we interpret it as intrusion, as though it has no rightful place in the story we thought we were living.

But I have come to believe that assumption is incomplete.

Because the most consequential moment in the history of the world was an act of suffering that was not avoided.

It was entered into willingly.

Jesus, standing in the garden, fully aware of what lay ahead of Him, said, “Not my will, but Yours be done.” He did not escape suffering. He consented to it.

And yet the prophet Isaiah tells us something even more revealing, not about Christ’s suffering itself, but about how it appeared to those who witnessed it:

“We esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.”

From the outside, His suffering looked like abandonment. It looked like defeat. It looked like affliction had defined Him.

And yet, that affliction was not the end of His story. It was the very place where the purpose of God was being revealed.

That raises a question we rarely ask ourselves:

If suffering was not meaningless in His life, what is it in ours?

Six weeks after my wedding, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Moments like that divide life into before and after. They confront you with a reality you did not choose and cannot reverse. And in that moment, you are forced to interpret what has happened.

You can conclude that something has been taken from you.

Or you can begin to consider whether something is being given, though in a form you never would have chosen.

During that time, my father spoke words from the apostle Paul that I did not fully understand then, but I found strength in, and which have stayed with me ever since:

“My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).

Not in spite of weakness.

In it.

Through it.

Over the years, I have come to see that suffering creates an interior space within a person that nothing else can create. It dismantles the illusion of self-sufficiency. It exposes how much of our identity was built on our own strength, our own ability, our own control.

And in doing so, it creates the possibility that something stronger might be formed.

We live in a time where many people suffer without meaning. They experience illness, loss, and limitation as random blows of circumstance. And suffering, when it appears meaningless, isolates. It produces despair, because pain without purpose feels like abandonment.

But the New Testament speaks about affliction differently.

Paul writes something that, at first glance, almost seems impossible:

“Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:17).

He does not say affliction merely precedes glory.

He says it is working it.

Producing it.

Forming it.

This suggests that affliction is not empty. It is not wasted. It is participating in something eternal.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote:

“Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice… but the voice of eternity within a man it cannot drown. When by the aid of affliction all irrelevant voices are brought to silence, it can be heard, this voice within.”

Affliction silences many things. It silences illusions. It silences self-sufficiency. It silences the false belief that our lives are sustained by our own strength.

And in that silence, something else begins to emerge.

Something eternal.

I do not presume to fully understand this.

But I have come to believe that affliction presents a question worth living:

If affliction is a price…

what does it purchase?