Quotes about Suffering

Not until history has run its course will we understand how "all things work together for good." Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse.

the parents of a severely disabled child have no end in sight.

Wounded people who have been broken by suffering and sickness ask for only one thing: a heart that loves and commits itself to them, a heart full of hope for them.

That, I believe, is also what faith sometimes requires: trusting God when there is no apparent evidence of him—as Job did. Trusting in his ultimate goodness, a goodness that exists outside of time, a goodness that time has not yet caught up with.

In his list of fruits of the Spirit, Paul includes one that we translate with the archaic word "long-suffering." We would do well to revive that word, and concept, in its most literal form to apply to the problem of long-term pain.

a suffering person needs: love, and not knowledge and wisdom.

Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

I cannot stop anyone from making wrong choices. I can only help them make the right ones." There was deep sadness in Ruwach's tone, rooted in love, as if he would have done anything to prevent Brianna from suffering the consequences of her choice.

instead of allowing the enormity of the world's sufferings to make me unhappy, I have allowed it to increase the depth of my gratitude for the blessed life that I have been allowed to lead. You can look at the amount of suffering in the world and become bitter (this world stinks), cynical (nothing matters, it's all just a roulette game), or hedonistic (with all this suffering, I'll rack up all the fun I can) — or you can be grateful for your blessings.

No one can rationally believe doing God's will guarantees one will, for example, never develop cancer or die in an earthquake. If that were the case, we would have to draw the irrational and cruel conclusion that anyone who dies prematurely was being punished by God—or the equally irrational conclusion that all those who live long and healthy lives have lived God-centered lives.

Many people seem to want this epitaph: "I led as painless a life as possible." But the purpose of life is not to avoid pain. That is the purpose of an animal's life—but animals cannot know happiness.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People and his lectures.