Are any among you suffering?  They should pray.  Are any cheerful?  They should sing songs of praise.  Are any among you sick?  They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord.

Sometimes when we read the Gospels we view them as books of rules, admonitions, blessings, revelations about God and the kingdom and so forth.  One may feel that they don't offer light on how to simply go about navigating the normal human emotions which accompany us on any given day.  But the Word of God gives us light in this passage.

The Greek word for "suffering" can be translated as "experiencing sadness," including an affliction or sickness of the soul.  Many of the saints have written about the great danger of sadness and how it is a choice weapon of the devil, leading us into potentially deadly sin.  Here the Word exhorts us to begin praying immediately when sadness comes knocking.  But one may be tempted to think that sadness is just another human emotion which can be indulged in and is not harmful.  So one perhaps toys with sadness, drinks deeply of it, perhaps even revels in it, listening to sad, emotional music, letting gloom seep deeply into the soul, not expecting it to cause undo harm but rather anticipating it to pass in due time.  But while in the midst of this wretched, un-Christian state one is vulnerable to innumerable sins and can in fact quickly lose ground which has taken much time to gain.  One then stands on the deadly precipice of hopelessness, thinking that the virtuous life is impossible, that God's demands are unreasonable and that one will never attain constancy and virtue.  All because one made a choice to embrace sadness, perhaps only because they felt in doing so they would be more fully human and empathize with their worldly brothers and sisters.

One must simply flee from some things and sadness is one of them.  Flee to where?  Not to the worlds consolations of alcohol, noise, distraction...but rather to prayer so that we may "ask him to send the grace of his consolation, and not imbibe the world's sadness, which only leads to death." (St. Bede)