Suffering

"God looks to you to be more open and more pliant. If you are to enter into Him you need to be freer and more eager. Have done then with your egoism and your fear of suffering. Love others as you love yourself, that is to say admit them into yourself, all of them, even those whom, if you were a pagan, you would exclude. Accept pain. Take up your cross, my soul." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, from "Hymn of the Universe".