Suffering & Sunflowers

"Tell me about a challenge you faced and how it influenced your faith."

My best friend’s dad died halfway through our senior year of high school.

We had been going through a rough point in our friendship, and we had finally made up about a week before he passed away. Some of our close friends were at the hospital with her the night he died, and I wasn’t. My inability to be there for her was something I struggled with and continue to struggle with during her grieving process. At times, I wasn’t sure if she’d even want me there, or if she had forgiven me for the previous issues in our friendship. Even now, it’s hard to tell if I’ve forgiven myself.

Throughout senior year and into college, two big stumbling blocks for me in my inner life that emerged because of his death became apparent. I was struggling with the issue of suffering, a problem that many Christians wrestle with, especially why bad things happen to good people. My friend was one of my first role models with my faith, she was the first woman I saw veil, and her relationship with God was seriously impacted by her dad’s death. I watched her mom attempt to raise her children as a single mother after losing a man she was very much in love with, I watched her brothers refuse to let her take down their Christmas tree because putting it up was one of the last things they did as a family before he went into the hospital. I saw their pain, and I suffered with them.

When I got to UVA, I really felt like my faith became my own. I started going to daily Mass, I started veiling, and when I couldn’t go to daily Mass I would stop by the perpetual Adoration chapel at STA. One day when I was in the chapel, I just remember looking at the crucifix and seeing Jesus there and asking Him about why my friend and her family were suffering. His response was, “I suffered for them.”

I still struggle with the issue of suffering, and I don’t know that I will ever overcome that short of Heaven. What I do know is that the promise of Christianity was that crucifix, that we have a God who knows and loves us and suffers with us. I still am upset for my best friend. I probably always will be. But God is not upset with me. And that doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it beautiful.

I think the other thing I really struggled with was blaming myself for not being more for her there both senior year and afterward. I think the hardest part of forgiveness can be forgiving yourself, but something I’ve come to realize as I’ve grown closer to Jesus is that we shouldn’t be harder on ourselves than God is. Part of trusting God is trusting that He tells us the truth about ourselves, and that truth is that we are His, we are loved, there is nothing we do that He won’t forgive us for. Humility is giving credit where credit is due, and that also means recognizing our goodness as His children. I felt like I’d failed my best friend for a while, but God loved me in spite of that and so I also should love and forgive myself.

I guess my final thought with all this would be that these mountains in my faith life are still mountains. They’ve definitely gotten better, but they’re not gone completely, and that’s okay. Something a priest told me in confession once when I was upset about habitual sin is that God made the sunflowers and the sunrises all the same. He loves doing repetitive things with you, and I may never get over those mountains. But I know that He is climbing them with me and will be there for me every step of the way.

I’m Rebecca Bailey and I’m a second-year from Suffolk, Virginia. I’m a theater nerd, and I love trying strange foods (including escargot, a chicken heart, rose petal ice cream, and a dill pickle snow cone).