Suffering

I think I am turning into a crazy mystical woman :) The day draws ever nearer when cats shall begin to appeal to me and I collect 10 of them. Then I shall stop washing, remove myself from society and start eating only lentils.

My intentions for today are not coming to pass. I feel unnerved, as if from some alternate universe I'm trying to get my own attention. I can't hear what the alternate me is saying, but it's distracting me from the day I planned, a day of soup making, reading for my literature class, housework etc.

There are all of these things I want to talk about, spiritual things that I feel I'm beginning to learn, but which are untranslatable, falling down as they do in the gulf between my spirit and my mouth. I think I need to write some fiction before I go a bit loopy(er).

I wanted to talk about suffering. Having just come out of a two-month long bout of it, I feel like something has shifted. But again, it's indefinable, spiritual and untranslatable. I am getting used to this feeling. It's like every time I go through a furnacelike experience, something gets drossed away. And when I come out the other end, no matter how unbearable it was at the time, I whisper in my spirit that I welcome the next time; I consent to doing it again. It's like a spiritual birthing process. But I don't know what the baby is.

Well, it's me, isn't it. There is purpose in everything. All of this falling to the ground, dying. It effects. It unsmudges a portion of the glass.

Can someone explain to me what this verse means from Colossians: "I am glad when I suffer for you in my body, for I am completing what remains of Christ's sufferings for his body, the church."

"What remains of Christ's sufferings"? Huh?