If you give it to God, He transforms your test into a testimony, your mess into a message, and your misery into a ministry.

The peace we are offered is not a peace that is free from tragedy, illness, bankruptcy, divorce, depression, or heartache. It is peace rooted in the trust that the life Jesus gives us is deeper, wider, stronger, and more enduring than whatever our current circumstances are, because all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken.

How we respond to what happens to us - especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over - is a creative act.

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we've bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.

Lodged The rain to the wind said, 'You push and I'll pelt.' They so smote the garden bed. That the flowers actually knelt, And lay lodged -- though not dead. I know how the flowers felt.

Grievances are a form of impatience. Griefs are a form of patience.

If you're too weak to handle failure and disappointment, then you're too weak to handle success, which will only end up damaging your life and happiness.

The human capacity for suffering was like that for joy. It could only have the greatest impact in small doses. After that, mind and body could no longer take it in.

The secret formula of the saints: When I am in the cellar of affliction, I look for the Lord's choicest wines.

Religion prescribes to every miserable man the means of bettering his condition; nay, it shows him that the bearing of his afflictions as he ought to do, will naturally end in the removal of them.

But perhaps God's purpose in the world (I am only thinking aloud here) is to draw his creatures to him. And you have to admit that tragedies like this one at Virginia Tech help to do that!