God does not want to make us comfortable as much as He wants to make us comfort-able - to take the comfort that we receive and share it with others.

Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.

But suffering can either destroy you or it can save you. Because without suffering, we don't need more; we have enough. But when we suffer, we can't help but reach out. It forces us into God's arms, and that's where we find not only what we need, but more than we can imagine. We find Him.

You might have healed from the event, but you continue to bleed from the impact.

The death of my own son has made me more sensitive. It's made me more compassionate.

But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space.

Forgive my grief for one removedThy creature whom I found so fairI trust he lives in Thee and thereI find him worthier to be loved.

No man can have true sympathy who has not been, in some measure at least, "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief," but the sorrow and grief must have passed, must have ripened into a fixed kindness and habitual calm.

Unfair suffering is never funny.

All the ache in my heart and the wound in my soul All the tearing apart at saying good-bye All the pain deep inside, like a dam giving way . .

The pain in my body could not match the pain her cry surfaced in my heart. They cleaned her, weighed her, wrapped her, and whisked her away. And it was then that I realized the much-greater pain is not in giving birth but in releasing your own child.

O Lord, Sula," she cried, "girl, girl, girlgirlgirl." It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.