How do you face suffering? 1 Peter 4-5

1 Peter 5:6-7
" Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you."

The Christians, in Peter's day, were under immense struggle and persecution.   Nero was charging up his kingdom and Christians would soon be the entertainment for his sport and his fuel for lighting the streets during that entertainment.   Peter is preparing these believers, and us, to not be alarmed at persecution and suffering.   As Christ suffered (1 Peter 4:1), so too will we.  This is a foreign concept to Westerners, our society.    However, in China, Africa, the Middle East, this is the norm, not the exception.   Peter wants them to find hope in the plan of God (He will judge those who are causing their suffering) and the hope in Christ (He will rescue and bring us all to Him).   That is the purpose of the book.   As we read the above verse we should be careful how we quote it.  Most simply pull the verse out of the context and take great hope that if things are going well, God will exalt you in due time.   However, we mostly interpret this in the context of our jobs or temporal life.   We believe that it means if we are having a bad day God will eventually put us in the place or station of life we deserve and, might even believe we deserve.    However, the immediate context of the passage is that, since we face such certain and expected persecution for our faith (meaning: A loss of material possessions, jobs, leg, limb and life), we are to humble ourselves under God's will (1 Peter 4:1-2) and expect Him to exalt us (in the spiritual world) in due time.    God is going to exalt us to heaven because we are "in Christ" and our hope is in the exaltation.    We are not to ignore the certain sufferings.  They are real and painful.  But, we are not to lose hope about them.  We are to, in faith, trust in God's leading, protecting and elevating us, in due time.   It is okay to believe, that, as we humble ourselves, God will certainly exalt us into positions and responsibilities in this world (think Joseph or Daniel).   There are plenty of passages that preach God doing just that for His children.   But, the context in the above verses is much bigger for us.   We can rejoice that the worse it gets for believes the closer we get to being exalted into the presence of Christ, who also suffered that we might have that hope.