I had to look up allergic rhinitis. You have bad hay fever?
There are two ways to look at your situation.
One is to compare your earthly existence to Maryâs and her Sonâs. If the worst thing in your life is hay fever---- youâre doing pretty well.
What did they have to deal with? They had to deal with poverty, with rejection, with having to flee their home country because people wanted to kill them, and eventually being killed in the most inhumane way possible. Some mystics say that Mary was an active participant in her Sonâs suffering, just as other mystics were to later participate in the Passion on a weekly or annual basis. And on top of all that, they didnât have central heat and air, had to walk wherever they wanted to go, didnât have running water, didnât have modern medicine, didnât have a grocery store, and didnât have food stamps or welfare checks or housing vouchers.
Of all the billions of people who have walked the earth, they were probably two most perfect onesâ and yet they werenât spared suffering. They know all about it, firsthandâ but more importantly, they redirected their suffering to a greater purpose.
Are you able to take your suffering and redirect it to a greater purpose?
The second way of looking at it is, God isnât so concerned about the material. Thatâs why, when he was the one person in the world who could choose his family, and choose the time and place and circumstances of his birth, he picked to be born into poverty in an obscure part of the world that no one would ever have cared about in the normal course of events. Some of his saints come from great royal lines and noble families, but even more so, they generally come from the commoners and those who are immersed in poverty and humility. Any ordinary person can achieve sainthood-- enjoying the beatific vision for all eternity-- whether or not theyâre ever formally canonized. Thatâs the goal of all of us.
What God is concerned about is the spiritual. He cares about souls, about eternity. And so, when he dishes out the graces we need, they generally take the form of something inward, that leads us towards heaven, rather than the form of a winning lottery ticket. So if you have a great King-- one who controls the entire universe-- and the great King has a little beggar at his gate, and the beggar asks for a pencil, or a prune, or a shoelace-- and the King has the capacity to give them so much more than that, if only theyâre disposed to cooperate and receive it-- how would the scenario play out? All of us are that beggar, but we generally are preoccupied with prunes and pencils, rather than focusing on the great treasures God would prefer to share with us. Because weâre limited in our ability to comprehend, and the treasures of God arenât always things weâre able to appreciate with our limited senses. 