I want to follow God's will for me and love God with my whole heart and entire existence. I've long believed that I must not be doing it right but I don't know how or what to change. I've always been taught and believed that by doing God's will, you will suffer, but will ultimately get some kind of joy or something out of it. Someone in this thread even mentioned that earlier. Experiencing decades of near hopelessness, loneliness, and pointlessness and misery leads me to believe that I'm not doing something right, but prayer for strength and the guidance to recognize and follow God's wll has been pointless as well. When you have a steady, lifelong stream of the following events happen, it's hard to persist:
Having a temp/contract job and learning that an opportunity exists to get hired full time. After praying for it to happen, the project I'm on gets canceled and instead of getting the full time job, I lose the temp job.
At one point, a little over 10 years ago, I did have a good group of close friends. I made prayers of thanksgiving to God for finally allowing it. Within a month, most of them moved away, got married or some such thing and the entire group fell apart and contact was lost leading me back to loneliness.
Befriending a Catholic woman who I was developing a good relationship with as friends and hoping to take it to the next level, but before that could happen, something came up on her end and she had to move to the other side of the country and ultimately contact was lost.
Multiple other similar events . . . .
Like I said earlier, God definitely calls people to hermetic life. I don't believe that's what I'm called to (perhaps I'm wrong) because I don't think I have the strength and mental capacity and fortitude to handle it.
Bataar, this is the best post you've written. Now I think I can see you better.
I understand what you are going through, as I too have had a lifelong series of unremitting and almost incomprehensible events that have shattered every hope and dream I might have conjured. I am almost twenty years your senior, and do testify to you that your plight could go on for an even longer time. No one knows the future, but there are many people who suffer their entire lives - but then they possess God for all eternity in Heaven.
Our Lady told holy Jacinta of Fatima that She could not promise Jacinta happiness in this life, but She could promise happiness in the next.
I see clearly, now that you have provided some specifics, that you are suffering from events that are absolutely out of your control. This means you are squarely inside God's holy will for your life. You are not doing something wrong. I think you are confused though, and it is very understandable. Also, you are weary and tired of suffering. I understand.
As for myself, I stopped praying for temporal outcomes a very long time ago. My entire focus is on prayer and study. I ask for spiritual graces, most of the time, and I commend other souls to God.
I don't think there is any perfect thing to say to you to help you. But lately, with regard to my own spiritual journey, I have been considering more and more how unique we all are, and how each one of us is called to reflect, not only some attribute of God's perfection and virtue, but also some aspect of Christ's suffering during His earthly life.
Lonely people, I think, often compare themselves to others, and this causes tremendous pain. They may feel like outcasts and as if they have been rejected by God and men. When you contemplate your own painful predicament, and especially when you fully own that God is directing your life, and, in a sense, isolating you through your circuмstances, ask the Lord to help you know what aspect of His own dire suffering you are participating - for His glory.
You mention a belief you have, that by doing God's will, you will suffer, but will ultimately get some kind of joy or something out of it. There is only one good we can set our hopes on - eternal life. All other goods are transitory, and none of them have been promised to us. Only eternal life has been promised, and this promise is conditional, as it rests upon our co-operation with grace. If we set our hopes on anything temporal, we are setting ourselves up for a perpetual dashing against the rocks of disappointment. All temporal goods must be objects, not of desire, but of detachment.
Yet your pain and anguish are precious to Christ. We can be truly detached, but this does not take away pain. We have a nature, and the pain we feel is caused by privations of things our nature sorely craves - love, friendship, sympathy, human society.
Think of our Lady. She had to absolutely detach from the good of Her Son, so that she could obey the will of the Father that He undergo His Passion and Death. Her detachment was so perfect that She actually willed His Bloody Sacrifice. But Her love and Her finite human nature suffered such a martyrdom, as to be comprehensible only in the comprehension of eternal beatitude. We detach and yet we suffer exquisite pain - pain which rivets the Sacred Heart, and draws down His ardent and compassionate love.
Human pain is a powerful magnet for the Divine iron.
Catholicism is the religion for the longsuffering.
Jesus saith (Proverbs 23:26):
Son, give Me thy heart.
Topic: Suffering from loneliness (Read 23074 times)