Here is a thought experiment you might find helpful next time you’re going through a very hard trial in life, having doubts you can persevere through it.
Here are two truths: after we die, we continue to be alive for eternity—life after death is infinite. But however long we live in this life, or how hard the trial is, it is finite.
Now compare your trial to the worst trial imaginable. Say someone must live almost to eternity, figuratively speaking, that is eternity minus one day making their life almost infinite but not quite, and therefore finite.
We could scale it smaller and say the person lives a million years experiencing more pain than any person ever has, even more than the sum total of everyone’s pain. And they have to endure it in a prison isolation cell with no contact with any person. For a million years.
Surely the evil spirit would tempt that person to despair and to take their own life. So they have two choices. Go down that path and suffer eternal hell, unimaginably worse than he is already suffering. Or he can humbly accept the pain in prayer, and wait one million years.
On the other side of this redemptive suffering is infinite bliss. So no matter how bad our situations might get in this short life, and they can get very bad, it is a no brainer. Offer to up in prayer, do God’s will, then one day all that pain will appear like a speck of dust in paradise.
So as crazy as it sounds, in reality it is not crazy. There is only one right choice and that is to embrace suffering no matter how bad or for how long it is. We are given only one life, this one life, and in the end will die, be judged, then sentenced to eternal misery in hell or eternal bliss in heaven.
So in reality it would be better to suffer horrible pain for a million years, or eternity minus one day, and then be eternally happy in heaven, looking back on that as a speck of dust, than to burn in hell for eternity for giving up hope and faith in God’s mercy and Providence.