For this reason it is the dark that provides the leader with his greatest opportunities. It is your response to the dark that determines in large part whether or not you will be called on to lead. For the darkness is what keeps the average person from stepping outside the security of what has always been.

Whenever you're going through a tough time, generally, you become more compassionate, you become softer, you become more thoughtful, kinder. These are all spiritual qualities that will help you to align yourself with God and God consciousness rather than with a split fear-based consciousness.

Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.

While therefore your tears flow, let a due proportion be tears of joy. Yet take the bitter cup with both hands and sit down to your repast. You will soon learn a secret: that there is sweetness at the bottom.

I want to see Christian fiction speak to the hard and real issues that tear people's lives apart.

Imagine no more tears, no more sorrow, no more pain... and one day we will forever be with Jesus.

Pain is the doorway into deep. Know what I mean? And tragedy is nature's great purifier. It burns away the fakeness, fear and arrogance that is of the ego. Returns us to our brilliance and genius, if you have the courage to go into that which wounds you. Suffering yields many rewards, including empathy, originality, relatability and authenticity.

it's at least possible that God is wise enough to foresee that we need some pain for reasons which we may not understand but which he foresees as being necessary to some eventual good. Therefore, he's not being evil by allowing that pain to exist.

One writer referred to the problem of pain as "the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Vincit qui patitur [he who suffers conquers].

Consider anything, only don't cry!

Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make ONE respectable person!