The Cup of Suffering
What was truly terrifying about that lawsuit
was never simply winning or losing.
It was this:
how it slowly, little by little,
consumed a person.
The actual trial lasted only ten days.
But before those ten days
came five full years of struggle.
Negotiations.
Broken agreements.
Renegotiations.
Then everything overturned again.
Over and over.
Later, I came to understand:
sometimes, what the other side truly wants to destroy
is not your evidence.
It is your spirit.
They want you to grow tired.
To doubt yourself.
To slowly begin thinking:
Maybe giving up would be easier.
And the most frightening part is that
this kind of exhaustion does not arrive all at once.
It seeps in gradually.
Like water slowly leaking into a wall.
By the time you notice it,
the entire wall is already soaked through.
During those years,
I often could not sleep through the night.
Many nights,
the only thing I could do was keep walking.
Walking in the dark.
Just walking.
As if only by keeping my body moving
could I stop the things inside me—
the things on the verge of exploding—
from tearing me apart.
And Ming
also began slowly growing ill.
Looking back now, I understand:
the long-term stress
had already quietly entered our bodies.
Even years later,
a lipoma grew on my left shoulder.
The doctor said it was benign.
But I knew
some things are not only physical.
Sometimes,
human suffering truly remains inside the body.
And the darkest moments
came during the trial itself.
There were two times
when I stood beside a staircase
thinking:
If I jumped right now,
would everything finally end?
Before that,
I had never truly thought about suicide.
But during that time,
for the first time, I understood
why someone could reach that point.
Because some suffering
does not crush you all at once.
It slowly pulls you downward,
over a long period of time,
with no escape.
And during that period,
I suddenly thought about a passage from the Bible.
When Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane,
He asked the Father:
“If it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”
And in that moment,
I suddenly understood:
even Jesus
once wished that suffering would not come.
But in the end, He still said:
“Not my will, but Yours be done.”
For the first time in my life,
I truly understood
what the “cup of suffering” meant.
Some roads are not chosen because you want them.
They are placed before you by life itself.
And in the end,
the only question left is:
Are you willing
to drink from that cup?
Many years later,
when I went through another even greater disaster—
the pig-butchering scam that nearly destroyed me financially—
I suddenly realized:
I had felt this before.
The same exhaustion.
The same emotional pulling.
The same cycle of giving you hope,
only to take it away again.
You begin doubting yourself.
You become exhausted.
You slowly lose your judgment.
And the most dangerous thing
is not the suffering itself.
It is when a person becomes so tired
that they no longer want to resist.
Now, looking back, I finally understand:
that courtroom was never just a lawsuit.
It was the first time in my life
that I learned how to survive
inside long-term emotional destruction—
and still remain alive.
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