Everybody need a partner to stand right by their side. Not only down for the good times. But also down through the bad times.

When you are in the midst of suffering you are looking for someone to be Jesus to you. You are looking for someone to love you and help take care of you, and reach out to you.

I pray that politicians, lawmakers and religious leaders have the courage to support the choices terminally ill citizens make in departing Mother Earth with dignity and love.

There's no text that can replace a loving touch when someone we love is hurting.

The ill are damped with pain and anguish at the sight of all that is laudable, lovely, or happy.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

Morris again. "This is good, helpful. Now that we are talking this way, I realize that for those twenty years that I was an engineer sitting in the pew each Sunday, I never had a patient pastor—they were all trying to get me 'with the program,' shape me up, get me, as they put it, 'involved.' I don't want to become a pastor like that. I don't think that is what pastors are for.

A beautiful discipline of the soul can become sappy, mindless counsel, if we divorce it from the biblical roots of honesty, grief, lament, and genuine celebration from which it originates. No! If we are to live praising lives, robust lives of affirmation, we must live truly, honestly, and courageously. We cannot take shortcuts to the act of praising. We cannot praise prematurely.

Lamentations is insurance against premature comfort, against "healing the wounds of my people lightly" During the time of ruin there are always those who attempt to cover the wounds of judgment with band-aid comfort. But comfort cannot function apart from a serious grappling with the pain of judgment.

God comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us.-2 Corinthians 1:4

When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.

I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief