Oh, how everything that is suffered with love is healed again!

Suffering can become a means to greater love and greater generosity.

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

Heartache forces us to embrace God out of desparate, urgent need. God is never closer than when your heart is aching.

I wished God were like He used to be, a few notches lower. I wanted Him to be lofty enough to help me but not so uncontrollable. I longed for His warm presence, times when He seemed more… safe.

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

We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.

And so we gain hope—not from the darkness of our suffering, not from pat answers in books, but from the God who sees our suffering and shares our pain.

Neither explaining suffering nor offering a program for the elimination of suffering, Lamentations keeps company with the extensive biblical witness that gives dignity to suffering by insisting that God enters our suffering and is companion to our suffering.

Neither prophets nor priests nor psalmists offer quick cures for the suffering: we don't find any of them telling us to take a vacation, use this drug, get a hobby. Nor do they ever engage in publicity cover-ups, the plastic-smile propaganda campaigns that hide trouble behind a billboard of positive thinking. None of that: the suffering is held up and proclaimed—and prayed.

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.

I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.