 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and I've been thinking about the nature of suffering recently, so this will be an uplifting video. Last night I made my wife watch the original, I say the original, it wasn't the very first one ever, but the original Spider-Man from 2002 with Toby Maguire. Now that Spider-Man movie for the record is the best Spider-Man, Toby Maguire's Spider-Man is the best Spider-Man, hands down I will die on this hill, the third Spider-Man movie with Toby Maguire obviously was horrible and abomination and we'll never talk about it. But in those first two movies, one of the things that makes those movies so good as compared to later iterations on the Spider-Man movies is that in those first two movies, Toby Maguire's Spider-Man suffers, and I mean he suffers a lot. If you go back and re-watch those movies, you'll see it, nothing goes well, right? Uncle Ben dies because of choices he made that seemed just and right and vindictive at the time, but he ends up suffering for it. I mean this character loses his father figure, he can't have any friends, he's completely isolated and alone, he feels burdened with this duty to protect people because he has this great ability, and the whole movie, he's just getting his teeth emotionally and physically kicked in. It's just suffering all the time. His best friend is dating the girl of his dreams, but he can't date her either because he, you know, again he's carrying this burden and no one can know because they'll use it against him. The person who he looked up to ends up being his arch-villain, like there's just every turn that Spider-Man is suffering, and so as I was watching that movie last night, I was I was reflecting on the nature of suffering, and I think that there are two ways to approach suffering in your life because suffering is going to come into your life one way or another. Either you can look at the suffering and it can make you bitter, right? Which again, in the Spider-Man movie, it captures brilliantly because James Franco's character does suffer and it makes him bitter and he harbors resentment and anger and rage. Or you can suffer the way that the Spider-Man character, Peter Parker's character, suffers and you can let it forge you into who you are, right? That whole movie is about suffering, forging this Peter Parker into the man he is supposed to be, into a man driven by duty and honor and sacrifice. Now in our current modern culture, right, it's really easy to scoff at these virtues and say that's preposterous and ridiculous and for suckers and, you know, it's very easy to have a nihilistic, kind of blackpilled, feudalistic view of the world. And as we live in a society that is in decline, I think that viewpoint will be a complete detriment to what comes after because remember, there's always something coming after and out of the ashes of one empire, will rise the next. And what kind of empire do you want that to be? Do you want that to be one where, again, you're going to trash all of the virtues that once made our country great, and then what do you think is going to happen? Do you think there's going to be some kind of great civilization to arise out of that? Of course not. What we need to do is value these virtues and when suffering comes in your life, because again, it will come, right? You're going to suddenly lose your job, someone you love is going to die, there's all kinds of horrible things in life that can and most likely will happen to you at some point or another. And when that suffering hits, you can either allow it to forge you into a person of worthy character and virtue, or you can harbor the anger, bitterness and resentment, right? And this is, of course, what we charge the leftists with all the time. They've allowed their suffering, real or perceived, right, to make them the victim, and they harbor the bitterness and the resentment and the anger, right? Or you can allow the suffering to forge you into a person of virtue and character. Now, side note, caveat here, you should do that because you worship Jesus and he will equip you and empower you to do that. And there's a whole other sermon behind that, but, you know, I'm not a pastor and I'm not going to give those kinds of sermons here, just the life advice sermons. So all that to say, as we enter into a period of hard times, and as we, again, continue to have more difficult time generally in America as things get worse and worse. And as suffering comes to you personally and intimately, the way you approach that suffering is going to make you into the man or woman that you want to be. That's going to bring you to the place where you want to be or not. And it all depends on how you react to it. There's a lot of things in life that happened to you that are beyond your control, right? For example, losing your job or someone, again, you love getting killed in a car crash tomorrow, right? Those are things that just, that just happened. That's just part of life, unfortunately. So when it comes, I'll completely outside of your control, completely I look for, completely unexpected. What is the suffering going to do to you? Will it find you there being ready to be forged into a person of virtue and honor who's going to allow that suffering to shape them in a helpful growth manner? Again, go watch the Spider-Man movie. It really is a banger. 21 years later, it still stands up. Or are you going to allow it to create bitterness and anger and resentment? Because if you let that happen pretty soon, that's all you become. I know this might seem a little off topic for kind of a, you know, gun, a minute, American Minuteman channel thing, whatever we are going on here. I don't even know anymore. But I think it's an important topic to address because, again, in American Minuteman life, in combat, in life in general, suffering happens, right? There's lots of suffering in combat. So, how are you going to approach it? How are you going to let it shape you in the long haul? And will you find yourself ready for it? Or will you let it destroy you? Do brave deeds and endure.