Quotes about Suffering

The dead were to be envied. It was the living who had to suffer from loneliness and distrust.

Suffering is a part of every life. Rain falls upon every life. All people encounter tragedy. Everybody struggles through hardship—not just Christians. But for the believer, for the child of God, whatever comes into our life first comes through the grid of God's plan and purpose for our lives. There are no accidents in the life of the believer.

This is what we are called to be: a community characterized by radical, revolutionary, Calvary-quality love; a community that manifests the love of the triune God (John 17:21—26); a community that strives for justice not by conquering but by being willing to suffer; a community that God uses to transform the world by providing it with an alternative to its own self-centered, violent way of existing.

The crucified Christ, in short, gives us the "Magic Eye" to discern him in the depths of even the most horrifically violent portraits of God.

There is no single, all-determinative divine will that coercively steers all things, and hence there is here no supposition that evil agents and events have a secret divine motive behind them. Hence too, one need not agonize over what ultimately good, transcendent divine purpose might be served by any particular evil event.

God intentionally allows you to go through painful experiences to equip you for ministry to others.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts." The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments. The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.

scapegoaters, but rather on the side of the scapegoated victim.

The body grows slowly and steadily, but the soul grows by leaps and bounds. It may come to its full stature in an hour. From that night Rilla Blythe's soul was the soul of a woman in its capacity for suffering, for strength, for endurance.

what perverted shapes thwarted love can take.

Sometimes I wonder whether religion has been a curse or blessing to the world. It has much that is beautiful in it but it seems also to have caused hideous suffering