Quotes about Suffering

Neither prophets nor priests nor psalmists offer quick cures for the suffering: we don't find any of them telling us to take a vacation, use this drug, get a hobby. Nor do they ever engage in publicity cover-ups, the plastic-smile propaganda campaigns that hide trouble behind a billboard of positive thinking. None of that: the suffering is held up and proclaimed—and prayed.

Into the dark streets where the homeless groan, God speaks: "I've had enough; I'm on my way."

We don't become praising people by avoiding or skipping or denying the pain and the poverty and the doubt and the guilt but by entering into them, exploring them, minding their significance, embracing the reality of these experiences. That is what is so distressing about the religious entertainment industry in our land.

All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.

This joy is not dependent on our good luck in escaping hardship. It is not dependent on our good health and avoidance of pain. Christian joy is actual in the midst of pain, suffering, loneliness and misfortune.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, one of our great modern Isaian prophets who had extensive experience with violence in two world wars, wrote, "The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships."

The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.

A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering.

The gospel offers a different view of suffering: in suffering we enter the depths; we are at the heart of things; we are near to where Christ was on the cross.

When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.

God led Jesus to a cross, not a crown, and yet that cross ultimately proved to be the gateway to freedom and forgiveness for every sinner

People ask me, "What about Job?" My response is, "What about Jesus?" Job provides the question. Jesus gives the answer. The story of Job is about holding to our faith in the midst of trials and seeing God restore everything brilliantly. But the story of Jesus is the only one I follow.