I chose to believe

When I was about 10 years old, the story of Good Friday was told us at school. My sense of justice and aversion to pain caused me to put those events out of my mind. What did I have to do with how people mistreated a good man 2000 years ago?

At the age of 20 I was going through a really hard time. Was I just unlucky, at the wrong place at the wrong time? Or was there meaning to my suffering?

I chose to believe that my hardship had a purpose. If that were not the case, I would not want to live. In fact, I did not believe anything in this world could make up for the pain I had endured. Pleasures are fleeting and in the end we all die. I wanted the promise of something beyond the grave. Someone once accused me of being a "time glutton".

Contemplating my miserable state, my thoughts inevitably turned to Jesus. If my pain had a purpose, what about his?