The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, "How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life!" And in many ways, this is how the Christian should approach life's tribulations. As Jesus tells us in Mark 9:49, "For everyone will be seasoned with fire, and every sacrifice will be seasoned with salt." All Christians will suffer at some point, and should not be surprised at this. But what Marcus Aurelius was speaking to was a deeper way of thinking, for he was one of the later students of the Greek school of Stoicism.
We have all heard of being "stoic," and what we generally interpret this to mean is a person who feels no pain, or at least does not reveal themselves to be suffering from pain. A stoic is able to take mental or physical discomfort and not show it. But this is not what the Stoics were really all about.
Stoicism is a school of philosophy begun by Zeno of Citium, who lived in Hellenistic Greece from around 334 to 262 B.C. He began teaching in the open Stoa Poikile or "front porch" of the Agora in Athens around 300 B.C., and it is from "Stoa" that we get "Stoicism." The Stoics had numerous beliefs about logic, physics, and their interpretation of god. Unfortunately, none of the early writings of the Stoics remain, and we can only piece together their early philosophy from fragments. The Stoic philosopy endured in influence until well into the middle of the first century A.D. Perhaps the most important and longest lasting portion of their philosophy was their beliefs about emotions.
The Stoics believed that peace of mind was obtained by reaching a state of apatheia. The Greek word pathos meant suffering, feeling, or emotion, and apatheia, from where we get our word apathy meant "without suffering." Stoics believed that through logic and reason the will was able to control the emotions, both good and bad. They felt that happiness or eudaimonia was achieved by avoiding or controlling the emotions of desire, fear, pleasure, and sorrow. The wise person would not allow themselves to be controlled by these emotions, and therefore, would not suffer.
The word passion comes from the Latin passio, which means, "suffering, enduring." So passion was ruled out by those on the Porch in Athens. You avoided suffering by using the will to control your emotions. In particular, you controlled the things you could, such as your feelings, and you did not allow things you could not control to affect you. It is this "indifference to externals," meaning not allowing external things to bother you that I think led Marcus Aurelius to his statement about letting things that happen to us in life to distress us.
You can see how the original Latin meaning of passion led to our description of Christ's sufferings. But in today's usage, passion has come to mean caring deeply about something, and apathy has come to mean not caring about anything. And I don't think God wants us to live our lives without caring deeply. He wants us to love Him passionately, as in Luke 10:27, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind." A Christian is not to go around unfeeling, either. As D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, "...the Christian is not someone who has become immune to what is happening round and about him... the absence of a feeling of grief in a Christian in certain circumstances is not a recommendation for the Christian faith. It is unnatural."
What the Stoics got right was that we are not to allow these normal and natural feelings to dominate us. We cannot avoid suffering by simply choosing to ignore our pain. And many people do choose to avoid pain by not caring deeply about things. What we are to do is, "...bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (II Cor 10:5). We are to live life passionately. We are not to live our lives sitting on the front porch, unfeeling, letting the world pass us by so that we will never feel pain or suffering. But we are not to allow passion to rule us. That is the job of our Savior.
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