Quotes about Suffering

Jesus himself always went where the pain was. Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now.

When you put the Gospels in someone's life who hasn't walked any journeys yet, who hasn't lost, suffered, longed, and thirsted for anything, they will use it for power - I promise you. For personal power, reputational power, economic power, because that's where the ego always goes. We will use God for our own purposes which is the ultimate idolatry. But if you have made the journey into powerless somehow, I will be happy to put the gospel in your hands.

What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus? I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, to help us see how we ourselves have been "bitten" by hatred and violence, and to know that God's heart has always been softened toward us.

Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The "Christ journey" is indeed another name for every thing.

Christians learn to submit to trials because Jesus told us that we must carry the cross with him. Buddhists do it because the Buddha very directly said that life is suffering, but the real goal is to choose skillful and necessary suffering over what is usually just resented and projected suffering. In that the Buddha was a spiritual genius, and we Christians could learn a lot from him and his mature followers.

Grace is always a punishment for us.

Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now. It is rather amazing and very sad that we pushed it all off into a future reward system for those who were "worthy"—as if any of us are.

The global issues of injustice, the culture of death that we are a part of, the sufferings of the oppressed, all of these demand t hat we bring the Voice of the Spirit to these well-denied and disguised situations, and not just our own tiny judgments or anger. This i the difference between true Gospel and mere political correctness or Band-Aid liberal responses. We are holding out for the great Gospel...

one consistent and clear revelation in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, it is that the God of Israel is the one who turns death into life (see Deuteronomy 32:39, Romans 4:17, 2 Corinthians 1:9). When we can trust the transformative pattern, when we can trust that God is in the suffering, our wounds become sacred wounds and the actual and ordinary life journey becomes itself the godly journey, trusting God to be in all things, especially

Better to be in trouble with Christ, than in peace without him.

That is Pride," explained Wisdom. "It is the hardest enemy to see after you have been in the glory. Those who refuse to put on this cloak will suffer much at the hands of that most devious enemy.

Surrender . . .sacrificing my life or suffering in order to change what needs to be changed