Quotes about Suffering

I saw people around me who were falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism and substance abuse. It's seductive because alcohol is amazing and drugs are amazing, they work so well.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

We must invite the Cross to do its deadly work within before we can be free.

Christ gives us all we need to draw nearer to him and enjoy him amid difficulties and blessings. We may get tired, but not despondent. We will be sad, but not hopeless. We will endure pain, but we will not give up. We will enjoy blessings, but not grow proud. We see that our lives do not consist only in what we have, how we feel, or what we have accomplished, but in who we are in Christ. This enables us to stand where we would once have fallen down.

Conflict with others is one of God's mysterious, counterintuitive ways of rescuing us from ourselves. God uses it to get us where he wants to take us before we die. Because we don't usually think that trials can be used in such a positive way, this truth catches us by surprise. But it shouldn't.

We shouldn't be surprised when suffering and difficulty come our way; in fact, we should probably be surprised when they don't.

Paul and Silas sang hymns in the Philippian jail. You can only do that if you have remembered that your welfare and freedom are in the hands of an all-powerful God who is your Father. Much of the drama of God's people is a drama of identity.

Jesus was willing to be the forsaken brother so that we could have godly relationships. Jesus was willing to be the crucified King so that our communities would experience peace.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.

Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase?

but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.

while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered. And such I think I have become.