You see, you and I only ever really understand the painful trials of this moment when we look at them through the lens of eternity.

Rather than suffering being connected to the bad things we have done, Scripture connects trials and difficulty to the good things God wants for us and is working to produce in us (see James 1:2—4).

Suffering doesn't so much change your heart as expose what has been in your heart all along.

There is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.

The wilderness creates unusual pressures and challenges.

my disruptive experiences are not outside impositions to or an attack on my faith, but are the soil out of which my faith matures and takes shape.

Getting there is all about dying, and each cycle of dying and rising we come to in our lives brings us, I believe, to greater insight into our deep selves, where Christ lives "in us" and our lives are "hidden" in God.

Grace grows best in winter.

I am amazed and encouraged by those who have lived through these moments of hell on earth and have continued on in the life of faith anyway. They have something to teach people like me: no matter what we think we know, no matter how sure we happen to think we are, suffering is the place where our sense of certainty about God's ways fades like a dream and forces us to consider that what we know may not be as central to our faith as we might think.

As it was, the heat consumed me by day and the frost by night, and sleep fled from my eyes.