Scripture never looks down on the sufferer, it never mocks his pain, it never turns a deaf ear to his cries, and it never condemns him for his struggle. It presents to the sufferer a God who understands, who cares, who invites us to come to him for help, and who promises one day to end all suffering of any kind once and forever.

I want to get you to think about and finally find comfort in the fact that our experience of suffering is never just physical. The pain that stops us in our tracks, that makes us want to pull the covers over our head and not face the day, and at moments makes us wish that we could die, is never just physical.

The brokenness around you affects you in different ways at different times. .................... . At every point and every moment, your life is messier and more complicated than it really ought to be because everything is so much more difficult in such a terribly broken world. But let us also see that this world of ours is more than a broken-down house. It is a broken-down house in the process of being restored.

Suffering confronts us with the fact that life is not about us but about God. It is not about our glory but his.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. C. S. LEWIS12

The world we live in is a house of pain, and we cannot live in it without it touching us. You will never be smart enough to escape its grasp. From the violence of childbirth to cut fingers and scraped knees, from sibling mockery and peer rejection to familial brokenness, suffering is part of every phase of human existence. We enter life through suffering's door and we exit life through suffering's door.

All the things that disappoint you now are to remind you that this is not all there is

if you don't keep the eyes of your heart focused on the paradise that is to come, you will try to turn this poor fallen world into the paradise it will never

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."5

So remember today that no matter how hard your story is right here, right now, it is guaranteed for you as God's child that it will end better than anything you can now imagine, and that glory will never end!

Live in hope because paradise is surely coming, and stop asking this fallen world to be the paradise it will never be.

When you have one eye on eternity, this present physical world looks entirely different.