A woman named Ruth was walking out of church one Sunday morning. She spotted an old man struggling to put on his coat. She walked over, smiled, and gave him a hand. She realised that she passed the old man’s apartment on her way home, so she gave him a lift. That began a weekly routine that lasted for two years. Then one Sunday Gus didn’t show up at church. Ruth went to his one-room apartment and found him very sick. He entered the hospital the next day. A few days later Ruth got a call from a nurse at the hospital. Gus was dying. He had only a day or so to live. “Have you informed his relatives?’’ Ruth asked. “He has no relatives,’’ the nurse replied. “ You are the only person he told us to notify in case of emergency.’’ Ruth was shocked. “Was Gus really that lonely?’’ She hurried to the hospital. When she arrived at his bedside, Gus was breathing hard and unable to speak. He did however seem to recognize her. A few minutes later Gus died. That story dramatizes in a moving way the two themes of today’s readings, suffering and service. Suffering and service are like the two rails of a train track. Where you find one, you find the other. They do this for three reasons. First, service always entails suffering. You can’t help another without making some sacrifice on your part. A second reason that suffering and service go together is that God always invites those who suffer to put their suffering at the service of others. God always invites them to unite their suffering to the suffering of Jesus. You may ask, “How can a person dying from cancer in a nursing home do anything to serve God’s people?” Today’s first reading answers that question. God says that through his servant’s suffering many shall be justified. Some of you may recall the example of actor Gary Cooper, who entered the Catholic Church just a few years before his death. In the final months of his life, he began to experience intense pain from his cancer. Msgr. Cunningham, his Parish Priest, gave him a small steel crucifix, saying: “Gary, hang on to this tight. When the pain gets really bad, squeeze it to remind yourself to unite your pain with the pain of Jesus for the salvation of souls.” That crucifix never left Gary’s hand from that moment until he died.Finally, there is a third reason that service and suffering go together because one of the simplest ways we can help others is to try to lighten the load of their suffering. We sometimes can be a very individualistic society and we sometimes are very insensitive to the sufferings of others, and we need to develop more our corporate consciousness. How can we help to lighten the load of members of our own family, member of our own community? A practical way we can cultivate an awareness of the suffering of others is through prayer. Prayer has a remarkable way of making us sensitive to suffering as no other exercise does. Try praying just one prayer daily for the gift of sensitivity to others, and you’ll experience this. Lets end with the prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy. “Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born into eternal life.’’