You have to go to Scotland at all times of the year - in order to appreciate the times when the sun does come out.

Looking to the past illumines the present. But make no mistake about it; it is painful. Because so few people do the hard work of going back in order to go forward, the symptoms of a disconnected spirituality are everywhere. The compartmentalization of our spirituality from the rest of our lives becomes necessary because there is so little integration.

We don't become mature human beings by getting lucky or cleverly circumventing loss, and certainly not by avoidance and distraction. Learn to lament. Learn this lamentation. We're mortals, after all. We and everyone around are scheduled for death (mortis). Get used to it. Take up your cross. It prepares us and those around us for resurrection. — Eugene Peterson

Rather than giving in to meaninglessness and despair, Christian artists know that there is a way out. Thus they create images of grace, awakening a desire for the new heavens and the new earth by anticipating the possibilities of redemption in Christ.

We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life- by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.

You know, I try not to look back, because looking forward is so much better than looking backward.

Grace is the seed of glory, the dawning of glory in the heart, and therefore grace is the earnest of the future inheritance.

But there's something earthy about my response to God that further sickens Satan. I believe he views disabilities as his last great stronghold to defame the good character of God. Suffering is that last frontier he exploits to smear God's trustworthiness.

We say, then, to anyone who is under trial, give Him time to steep the soul in His eternal truth. Go into the open air, look up into the depths of the sky, or out upon the wideness of the sea, or on the strength of the hills that is His also; or, if bound in the body, go forth in the spirit; spirit is not bound. Give Him time and, as surely as dawn follows night, there will break upon the heart a sense of certainty that cannot be shaken. —Amy Carmichael

And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal--carries the cross of the redeemer--not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

In one manner or the other, it still remains true that, even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross.