Near the end of our conversation with Cathy Loerzel, we asked a question we know lives in a lot of hearts:
“Will this ever go away? Will the pain finally disappear?”
Her answer was not what most people want to hear—but it’s the truth everyone needs to acknowledge. Healing, she said, doesn’t mean the suffering vanishes. It means we learn how to carry it differently.
At first, that can feel disheartening. Who wants to live with sorrow? But as Cathy unfolded her perspective, we began to see it as a hopeful invitation. She reminded us of Jacob in Genesis—the man who wrestled with God and came away both blessed and limping. That picture, she suggested, is closer to the reality of healing than a fantasy of pain-free living.
Cathy also pointed us to the rhythms of creation. Every fall, trees shed their leaves. Every winter, the ground lies bare and dormant. Yet spring always comes. Life is born out of death. Renewal follows loss.
That cycle is written into the fabric of the world, and into our own stories.
When we refuse to face suffering, we end up trying to live in a greenhouse—safe, controlled, predictable. But as Cathy said, greenhouse fruit is doesn’t taste as sweet. It looks fine on the outside but lacks depth. Real fruit, the kind that nourishes, grows in the open, through seasons of cold, heat, storms, and sun.
Where we deny the reality of pain, we live shallow lives. But where we face it, we discover more depth, empathy, and even joy. Cathy summed it up beautifully:
“Wherever you’ve denied your own suffering, you’ll ask others to deny theirs. But when you learn to befriend it, you can finally stand with people in their pain without fear.”
That’s the paradox of healing. We don’t escape suffering, but we learn how to live with it. And in that process, we find joy—not shallow happiness that comes and goes, but joy that grows out of honesty, courage, and the presence of God with us in the very places we once tried to avoid. It’s not the pain-free life we imagine, but it’s a real life, and a more beautiful one.
Listen to the full conversation with Cathy on What We Really Want to hear more. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast, and please consider writing a positive review wherever you get your podcasts.
