Kierkegaard's View of Suffering

In the last moments of his life, Kierkegaard endured heavy physical trauma.

In times of physical agony, one often asks what meaning the suffering has and why he was chosen for it. Kierkegaard provides a profound description of how God sees the devotion of those who suffer:

What does God really want? He wants to have souls that can praise, adore, worship, and thank him-the business of angels. That is why God is surrounded by angels. Because the sort of beings of which there are legions in 'Christendom,' the sort who for 10 rixdollars will roar and trumpet to God's honor and praise-that sort of being does not please him.

No, the angels please him. And what pleases him even more than the praises of angels is this: When, during the last lap of this life-when it seems as if God transforms himself into sheer cruelty and with the most cruelly devised cruelty does everything to deprive a person of all lust for life-when a human being nonetheless continues to believe that God is love and that it is from love that God does this-such a human being then becomes an angel.

And he can certainly praise God in heaven, but of course the time of instruction, schooltime, is always the strictest time. It is as if a person had the idea of traveling the whole world over to hear a singer with a perfect voice: That is how God sits in heaven and listens. And every time he hears praise from a human being whom he has brought to the most extreme point of weariness with life, God says to himself, 'Here is the voice.'"