Quotes about Suffering

We want to let people know that we can build solidarity with suffering folks so that they are not excluded, they are integrated.

No man is without his load of trouble.

There was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.

The enemy casts a shadow, big and dark and menacing. But there's no substance behind it. It has a stinger, but it's lost its venom. It has a bark, but no bite. We'll all suffer death in the lowercase. But by Christ's good graces, no one need suffer death in the uppercase. Death at that scale has been undone. Death still has battalions on the ground, pitching battle, making havoc, quibbling and collaborating among themselves. But the empire backing them has collapsed.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

Dodge, be honest. It's not close to over. You've been nursing this wound for nearly ten years, working it off over there in Afghanistan, trying to forget the girl you've loved since you were ten. There's no way this is over. There is so much bitterness sitting in your heart you can't even see it. But maybe that's why God brought you back - for her. And to set you free from all that darkness.

So he had them into the slaughter house, where was a butcher killing a sheep. And behold, the sheep was quiet and took her death patiently. Then said the Interpreter, You must learn of this sheep to suffer, and put up wrongs without murmurings and complaints. Behold how quietly she takes her death! And without objecting she suffereth her skin to be pulled over her ears. Your King doth call you his sheep.

In short, those of us who are in the church are in the vale of tears.

But he had been so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.

He wasn't just calling them into a life of sacrifice. He was calling them into a life of meaning, even the kind of meaning that would involve suffering. Suffering for a redemptive reason is hardly suffering, after all.

The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.

Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.