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.
Quote from Rob Bell Read More »
When confronted with suffering that won’t go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,…not on the Master’s hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just that you’re in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you… will begin to see the patterns. You’ll become a poet, sensitive to your Father’s voice.
Quote from Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World Read More »
The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.
Quote from Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island Read More »
Suffering just means you’re having a bad dream. Happiness means you’re having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.
Quote from Jed McKenna Read More »
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
Quote from John Keats, Letters of John Keats Read More »
The evil and suffering in this world are greater than any of us can comprehend. But evil and suffering are not ultimate. God is. Satan, the great lover of evil and suffering, is not sovereign. God is.
Quote from John Piper, Suffering and the Sovereignty of God Read More »
You may die a hundred deaths without a break in the mental turmoil. Or, you may keep your body and die only in the mind. The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.
Quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj Read More »
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.
Quote from Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents Read More »
The suffering of the Christian or anyone else in this world is never ultimately an accident. All suffering is within the pale of divine sovereignty. All suffering comes within the broader context of the sovereignty of God.
Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, you’d feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.
Quote from Geneen Roth Read More »