Some years ago, an Augustinian Recollect -José Luis Garayoa- who today rests in the Glory of the Father, wrote a column with this same title in a personal blog.
At the time it seemed to me an exaggeration.
Today with a few years of consecrated life and a couple of years of priesthood I understand that pain… Life sometimes hurts and it is neither good nor bad, it is not depressing or fatalistic.
Life hurts because living hurts, our life is a constant dying, or something I learned in philosophy.
Life hurts, because it is not always as we dream it, because parishioners are not always as we want them to be, or because young people do not respond as we would like, or because you meet someone on the street and they turn their eyes away from you.
The important issue here is not to lose hope… because if life hurts, it means that we are alive.
If life hurts, it is because it reminds us that we are not perfect, that we make mistakes and that we are not the shepherds that the people would like us to be, that we place very high expectations on young people, that we also hide our eyes from someone.
The pain of life must be converted into hope, into the hope of knowing that God is making us, into the joy of those who hope that everything will be as God wants it to be.
When life hurts me, as I also learned from Garayoa, the best thing to do is to put on our best face, because the Kingdom of God is God’s, not ours, we are just simple workers who do the best we can with the little we have.
When life hurts me, I listen to Ennio Morricone’ s The Mission and I am moved by the thought that I am only a small note -sometimes out of tune- of the beautiful melody that is creation.
That even if I make mistakes, even if things are not the way I want them to be, they will always be the way He wants them to be.
That is why today I thank God because life hurts me.