When bad things happen to us, we ask the perennial why questions: Why me? Why must I suffer? The saints have taken this plaintive cry and turned it from a wail of despair into a song of blessing. Instead of seeking a universal understanding of suffering, they have taken their own suffering and made it the transformative hallmark of their lives. They have turned their pain from something to be endured into a lesson to be embraced. Popular author Woodeene Koenig-Bricker shows us by the example of the saints how to transform our view of suffering. By considering how the saints dealt with pain, we see how suffering can become not something we must escape but something we can appreciate the means by which God shapes and forms us. These stories of the saints help us live holy and wholly human lives in, through, and by our suffering.
