Quotes about Struggle

I know what loves trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted, I have been torn apart.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad!

How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.

Nothing happens here except that I write and write, and curse and burn.

Certainly we struggle as victims of other people's unkindness. We have been sinned against. But we cannot excuse our sinful responses to others on the grounds of their mistreatment of us. We are responsible for what we do. We are both strugglers and sinners, victims and agents, people who hurt and people who harm.

The problem sincere Christians have with God often comes down to a wrong understanding of what this life is meant to provide.

If we look for ways to get rid of necessary pain, we'll be disillusioned or misled. For people who define real change as the elimination of inevitable struggle, the final chapters will be terribly disappointing.

Evangelicals sometimes expect too much or, to put it more precisely, we look for a kind of change God hasn't promised. It's possible to expect too little, but under-expectation is usually a cynical reaction to dashed hopes for too much. We manage to interpret biblical teaching to support our longing for perfection. As a result, we measure our progress by standards we will never meet until heaven.

Yes, she believed God loved her. But if this whole fiasco was His idea of love . . .

the world. When the men

Life is a mess. And theology must be lived out in the midst of that mess.