The crisis of faith that often accompanies suffering is the result of a collision between our will and God's will and our glory and his glory.

in the middle of the travail we all face one way or another, God is up to something good.

We all fail somehow, someway every day. Often failure is the workroom God uses in our lives to reform us to be what we need to be in order to be more successful tools in his hands.

No, trials expose what we have always been. Trials bare things to which we would have otherwise been blind. So, too, the teen years expose our self-righteousness, our impatience, our unforgiving spirit, our lack of servant love, the weakness of our faith, and our craving for comfort and ease.

when we are living in the middle of difficulty, we are tempted to view it as a sign of God's unfaithfulness or inattention.

Here is suffering's paradox: the very things we would do anything to avoid, the very things that confront our understanding of who we are, and the very things that cause us the most pain become the very things that usher into our lives the blessings of the help, hope, peace, and rest that we all long to experience.

The good news of the kingdom is not freedom from hardship, suffering, and loss. It is the news of a Redeemer who has come to rescue me from myself.

struggles are part of God's plan for you.

Suffering has the power to expose what you've been trusting in all along. If you lose your hope when your physical body fails, maybe your hope wasn't really in your Savior after all.

It's so easy to fail to live in light of the fact that Jesus didn't die just for your past forgiveness (praise God that he did) or your future resurrection (what hope!), but also for everything you are facing in the here and now.

No, I don't like the travail of pain or loss anymore than you do, but in my suffering, a miraculous thing happened: Mr. Hardship became a tool of my Savior to produce very good things in me, things that I am sure could not have been produced any other way.

So your trials are not a sign that God has forgotten you or is being unfaithful to his promises. Rather, they stand as a reminder that he is committed to his grace and will not forsake it—it will complete its work.