What's with Catholics and suffering?

It's said the Church was born on Easter morning, the day Christ rose from the dead. But it is suffering that made the Church grow.

Here are a few verses from the holy sciptures regarding suffering. You won't find these verses in those plastic boxes that were so popular in Christian bookstores in the 80's. God's promises or Promises of God I think they were called. Like mini flash cards to learn and memorize how much God loved us by the promises He gave us. More of the "Name it, Claim it" theology. Suffering wasn't a word that was mentioned in any of those verses.

I never would have known there were so many verses about suffering while ascribing to the Evangelical paradigm. Suffering was not brought up in too many sermons, at least not as something to be received with joy. I'm sure a few of these I'd read and come across but they weren't the ones that I tried to memorize. Suffering was, for the most part, something we tried to get rid of right off the bat, by prayer...never something we were told or taught to "embrace" as our cross, or as a way to draw close to Jesus. Of course we should try to ease the suffering of the poor, the pain of those in our lives we should help to relieve because it is the right thing to do and we know suffering isn't "plunked on us" from God. It's only right to relieve as much suffering in the world as we can, however, not to try every means to 'get rid of it' without understanding how close it can bring us to Christ. When we join our suffering to His, how efficacious it is for not only ourselves, but those we love.

The attitude seemed to be, back in the other non-denom fellowships we were attending: "Jesus died so we don't have to" "Jesus suffered so we don't have to" "Jesus did it all, so we don't have to 'work' for anything" Yet how does that comply with the words Jesus told his disciples? How did these latter day independent "churches" start getting off track so wildly? The 'mainline' traditional Methodist church my family belonged to, didn't share the same thoughts on suffering as the Assembly of God, or the other two independent ones we were part of for years.

Methodists I knew, didn't run to the nearest prayer meeting to "pray it away" (though they also didn't believe physical miracles were for the church in modern times, which wasn't correct either.) Of course, we're to call the elders to lay hands on us if we're sick, as we learn in the bible, but to know that there's God's will and our will, and that spiritual healing is also just as important if not more important; then to offer our suffering for others' salvation is the beauty of Catholic teaching = something abhorrent to Evangelicals - but my mom, more than I, seemed to suffer with a deep faith while seeking some relief and answers from medical science. She had a certain joy, never saying "this shouldn't be happening to me" though in her times alone, she may have, but she was not a whiner or one to mope if things did not go 'her way.' She was not 'consumed' with 'getting rid of her suffering' but still smiled in her hospital room, when her last days were upon her, when Shy Drager syndrome succeeded in killing her after only 5 years from the diagnosis. (SDS is a devastating and rapid progression of symptoms similar to Parkinson's disease.) She had a knowing and an understanding much more "Christian" than what I was learning in my 20's and 30's from some pastors and well-meaning but sorely misguided souls adhering to a certain paradigm found in evangelicalism. The minute we think WE can control God and have Him in our "little plastic box" is the day we're in BIG trouble!

It's only been since we returned to the Catholic Church, 3 years ago, that I began to learn what suffering is and how it is to be lived THROUGH, with our Lord, Jesus, and with our Lady of Sorrows, the title she loves most, for it is the title her Son gave her that he loves most. Something to think about. I typed in Google search, "Suffering and Catholic teaching" and this is what popped up. May we learn to embrace our suffering, not become masochists, which is perversion, but to be followers of Christ. Jesus suffered all his life, all the way to the cross to suffer for us. Who are we, as Jesus' followers to ever think that we should not?