Silver Lining?

This week, my pastor delivered a sermon entitled "It Will All Be Worth It". We are in the middle of a series of teachings out of the book of Romans. This particular message drew from Romans 8:18-30 and was basically about suffering, waiting, hoping and the good times. For someone who has gone to church nearly every Sunday morning and Wednesday night of her life, this message actually gave me no new information. Sure, I have heard it before. I memorized bits and pieces of Romans in my growing up years. Not to mention that everyone (Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Agnostic, Atheist, etc.) knows that life is not easy. We all experience suffering at one point or another. I think of this passage in Romans as being a guide to coping with the suffering.
Anyhow, yesterday, as I sat in my plastic chair under the tent I call "church", I listened nicely to the sermon, but did not expect to really "get anything out of it". Come on, let's face it, sometimes that's just the way it happens. Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that it is the fault of a boring pastor. I am not saying that once you learn a scripture, memorize it and hear x amount of sermons on it, you can never learn anything else from it. I am saying that sometimes we go into church with earplugs in. We might be preoccupied with things going on at work, home or elsewhere in life. We might be avoiding the voice of God because of a guilty conscience. We might be tired. We might be sick. We might be experiencing any number of excuses we use to be lazy about our striving towards being Christ-like. I know. I know because I've been in church my whole life. I know because I've listened to upwards of 3500 sermons, sunday school lessons and bible studies (not to mention the reading done on my own). I know about the "earplugs" because I use them more frequently than I would like to admit. But I have the conviction that God has given us the Bible as possibly the strongest, most reliable way to hear from Him. I believe that everytime we open it's pages, everytime we hear the words from it spoken He is trying to speak to us. We just need to take the earplugs out.
So back to the sermon, towards the end of the message, my pastor added in a personal story (these always help me to relate the scriptures to "real" life). He refered to a difficult year in his family. I won't go into the details (it's not really the point anyway). But he asked his sister (who is still in the midst of very difficult circumstances), if she could redo the last year, would she change the events that took place. She said no. She would not change even the most difficult parts of it because of how close it brought her to God.
I might be reading into this woman's life too much, but she probably feels a sense of amazement that she has gone through these circumstances and come out stronger. She probably feels that she now has a story to tell people about how God really works in real people's lives (it's not just the stuff of story books and legends!). She probably has a sense of wonder about the last year. She might look back on it and think "how in the world did I survive this without losing my mind?"
Our own lives are this way from time to time. For me, my most recent period of "suffering" (I put suffering in quotes because my suffering can hardly be considered as such compared to so many others suffering) was after I graduated college. I finished my bachelors in music after five years of school. I did two years in my hometown University and then transfered to a private (a.k.a. very expensive) college for the last three years. I knew that going to this school would mean student loans, but I simply had to go through this very specific program that not many schools offered. Well, long story short, I came to the end of the program only to realize that not only would I hate doing the occupation I thought I would go into, but I would not do a very good job of it either. So I did like so many other music majors do. . . I moved back in with my parents and started working at a coffee shop. It was a year and a half of working at a coffee shop and then at a health food store. It was a year and a half of making little more than minimum wage alongside high school dropouts. It was a year and a half of moving to my parents' house to my sister's house to my church friends' house. It was a year and a half of wondering "what am I doing with my life, why did I even bother with school, did I make a huge mistake???" I worried over it, got frustrated over it, but eventually said to myself "I don't understand why these are my circumstances, but they are. All I can do is keep doing the best where I am at and trust God. Maybe someday I will understand all this, maybe I never will, but either way I believe that there is a reason for it."
So then my period of "suffering" ended abruptly when I came to Egypt. Suddenly, life was exciting. Suddenly life was a challenge. Suddenly, life had meaning and a distinct purpose. I still didn't understand why I had the last year and a half of feeling like crap, but it was over and done. But yesterday, in my plastic chair, I had a revelation. Maybe I had to experience the suffering in order to experience all the joy I've had in my time in Egypt. Think about it. If I hadn't been so miserable in GA, would I have made such a rash decision to move to Egypt? If I had a job I actually felt attached to in GA, would I have abandoned it in order to stay here? And even if I had still decided to come to Egypt, how could I have appreciated the sense of purpose in my work here if I had never known what it felt like to have absolutely no sense of purpose?
It's really nice when that light bulb comes on in your brain and suddenly things that have been puzzling you for, well, years become more clear and understandable.