Maturing in faith is an endless process of refinement. Every time some little thing doesn’t go my way — it rains and ruins my plans, my razor falls on the floor and I have to pick it up, my wife interrupts my web surfing to ask me to help her with something — and I respond with a twinge of irritation or resentment, a sigh of why me, I am doubting God, just as Eve did when the serpent said, “You will surely not die.” I am believing that what I want is superior to what God wants for me.
The practice of Zen also requires that one forgo all resistance to what is, to inure oneself to the undesirable, not as an owed sacrifice to the One who created and loves us, but rather as a technique to eliminate suffering.
There is no such thing as the elimination of suffering, but there is such a thing as the sharing of our suffering with Jesus Christ who suffered with us and died to deliver us from the domain of darkness and transfer us to the Kingdom of God.