Spiritual Turkish Baths

Apparently I'm still stuck on Bonhoeffer and suffering and good stuff like that. . .

Soon after Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo and locked up in Tegel prison in 1943, he wrote to his parents:

"A violent mental upheaval such as is produced by a sudden arrest brings with it the need to take one's mental bearings and come to terms with an entirely new situation - all this means that physical things take a back seat and lose their importance, and it is something that I find to be a real enrichment of my experience. I am not so unused to being alone as other people are, and it is certainly a good spiritual Turkish bath." ~ Excerpted from this book.

Upheaval is as certain as waves on the ocean, and you can never be quite sure in what form it will come, or what kind of power it will bring to bear. Reading stories like Bonhoeffer's makes me startlingly aware that I have known very little of suffering. It almost makes me yearn for it a little bit - well, not for the suffering so much as the refining influence and the focus that scarcity of well being brings. The impurities and poison that remain in me need a good spiritual Turkish bath to sweat them out. Even so, I'm pretty sure I could never suffer as well as Bonhoeffer.

I'm sure I've quoted this line from Phil Keaggy before: "Suffering restores us, burns away the empty shallowness, softening the heart to be broken bread and poured out wine." But even better are these words:

"If we are children, then we are heirs - heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." Romans 8;17,18