You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.

While there may be thorns and disappointments, while there may be heartache, even heartbreak, there can be peace and comfort and strength from the Lord for those who follow Him.

Stories of the beleaguered Saints and of their suffering and death will be repeated again and again...Stories of their rescue need to be repeated again and again. They speak of the very essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

When Heaven has taken from us some object of our love, how sweet is it to have a bosom whereon to recline our heads, and into which we may pour the torrent of our tears! Grief, with such a comfort, is almost a luxury!

To have suffered so much in a certain direction that the suffering is finished, and only its particular wisdom remains, enables one, wherever that suffering presents itself, to understand and deal with it by pure sympathy; and when one has been perfected by suffering in many directions, he becomes a centre of rest and healing for the sorrowing and broken hearted who are afflicted with the affections which he has experienced and conquered.

God suffers with you!

The man who has not suffered - what does he know anyway?

A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.

His tears reached deep inside and tore great chunks from what was left of his heart.

Sometimes God comforts us directly, but that's not His only strategy. Normally He comforts us through His people—so if our lives aren't open to one another, they're closed to the Father's comfort. Let's share our lives; let's fellowship in suffering so that we can fellowship in His mercy.

Where is God in suffering? He's in it with us, and in it for us.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.