My alarm goes off at 6 am, waking me before the sun has a chance to warm the frigid river air that bites at me as I hurry to make the 7:15 Mass on time. I stumble through the Mass parts in German, holding back tears because everything feels so foreign. Afterward, I run to my German school down the street. After four and a half hours of grammar and confusion, I run to campus to have lunch with students, struggling to keep up with the fast-paced German conversations and not sound like an idiot. Meetings, more botched German, and loneliness fill my afternoon. I head to Holy Hour hoping for some consolation, but Jesus feels about as far away as my family in America. I sit in silence for an hour wondering what’s wrong with me. At night, I try to call my fiancé but the wi-fi connection drops every ten minutes until we are both frustrated and defeated. I do my German homework for class the next day, and then I crawl into bed around midnight, hoping that my thoughts stop racing so that I can get 6 hours of sleep before doing it all again tomorrow.

This was my daily life during the first few months as a full-time missionary in Germany. I don’t share these things to complain, because I myself didn’t acknowledge the strain that this schedule put on me until it was almost too much. I share because I want to set the scene in which I learned a lesson that has changed my spiritual life forever.

I’m sure each of you reading this can also identify a time, perhaps it’s right now, where you experienced life as a similar grind. Maybe work is overwhelming, or a relationship is strained, or your health is failing. I know from my own personal experience that when we are in the thick of these struggles, we often feel far from the Lord and unsure of how to get back to Him. We can begin to think, “If only X weren’t happening, my spiritual life would be thriving,” or, “Because Y is happening to me, Jesus must not be with me.”

It was during this time of real sacrifice and suffering in Germany that I felt this distance from Jesus, and I was so desperate to experience a deeper relationship with Him. My roommate was going through something similar, and our desires for transformative encounters with Jesus led us to decide that increasing our fasting would do the trick! We knew that fasting was powerful and that when united to the cross of Christ, it could have powerful effects. Sign us up!

Thankfully, a sweet German priest that we knew came to visit us in the midst of all this. When he learned of our resolution to strip ourselves of the very few comforts we had, he gently but firmly stated in his signature German-accent, “No fasting.” Huh? Neither of us knew how to receive this advice that at first sounded so wrong. “How else are we supposed to be transformed into Saints other than redemptive suffering?” I thought. (Admittedly, being a missionary in Europe sometimes makes you a little too, shall we say, hard-core?) He went on to ask in his concerned-fatherly way, “Don’t you think you are already doing enough penances?”

There it is, the simple sentence that changed my perspective forever.

In wanting to take on more fasting, I desired to have more reasons to rely on the Lord, more little gifts to give Him each day, and more ways to die to my own will in order to be more prepared to receive His. I realized in that moment that Father was not suggesting that we do not fast or suffer at all, but that we do not go out in search of suffering on our own when the Lord has ALREADY placed unique crosses in our lives for the very purpose of our own sanctification.

I had begged God for weeks to take me deeper, to allow me to encounter Him in ways that would change my heart, soften it, and make me more capable of love, but then I was too blind to see that He was already placing many such opportunities in my life. I just wasn’t willing to embrace them. Suddenly, it became clear to me that my frigid morning walks weren’t simply something to be endured, and my attempts at speaking German weren’t just humiliation, and my exhaustion was not because I wasn’t good enough. Each of these things, along with many others (such as having to eat microwaved sweet potatoes for practically every meal because our stove didn’t work and we didn’t have time to get much more creative than that) were daily opportunities to offer up my weak little heart to the Lord and to ask Him to transform me.

Our culture often encourages us to minimize or silver-line our suffering, but Jesus does not. He doesn’t ask us to suffer always either, but He does ask us to suffer with Him and to suffer well. How does one suffer well? It starts with accepting the crosses that Jesus gives us—not trying to ignore them or swap them out for others — but truly embracing each struggle, knowing that it is a unique gift from God intended to draw us closer to Him.

I heard the phrase “offer it up,” probably every day as I was growing up and, truthfully, I didn’t even really know what it meant. I took it to mean something more along the lines of “suck it up,” and so I subconsciously viewed my daily struggles as something to be ashamed of or simply survived and that real sanctification happened once I got my act together. This way of thinking has robbed me of the grace of encountering Jesus in MY story, in MY ordinary life. He doesn’t wait for us to come to Him with our extravagant fasts and complicated prayers, He comes to meet us in the wounds and crosses that we are already carrying. These places in our lives and in our hearts are deep wells, and learning to go into them is a key to having a constantly changing, constantly deepening relationship with Jesus.

Michaela Rodgers is a former international Catholic missionary who is now pursuing her passion of combining faith and fashion as she launched a new company, Thrifted and Threaded, with her twin sister and also works for ethical clothing line, Litany, in New York City. She has a deep love for authentic friendships, healing and wholeness, and all things thrifted. You can find more about her work here.