Where Is God When It Hurts? Quotes
"Like a dog on a fresh spoor I keep circling around the problem of pain, searching for clues."
"It's the only problem, in fact, worth discussing."
"The problem of pain is not a theoretical problem, it is a problem of relationship."
"Think too of all who suffer as if you shared their pain."
"A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside."
"I feel helpless around people in great pain."
"God, why us? Have you teasingly doled out one happy year of marriage to set us up for this?"
"Faith can move mountains, and that includes Hodgkin's disease."
"God, I love you for making me suffer like this."
"Their faith may increase because of your response."
"The problem of pain represents a profound riddle."
"You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you."
"The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace — a gift of God."
"Thank God for inventing pain! I don't think he could have done a better job. It's beautiful."
"Pain demands the attention that is crucial to my recovery."
"Pain—it's often seen as the great inhibitor, keeping us from happiness. But I see it as a giver of freedom."
"Pain is not an unpleasantness to be avoided at all costs. In a thousand ways large and small, pain serves us each day, making possible normal life on this planet."
"How singular is the thing called pleasure and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it... yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two but they are joined by the same head."
"Everywhere a greater joy is preceded by a greater suffering."
"I, along with most Americans, tend to see pain as a sensation that can and should be mastered by technology."
"It is not enough to walk alongside a swamp and listen to the frogs and crickets, to watch the turtles plop like bloated submarines into the water, to seek out the faint scent of wildflowers."
"The body contains no dedicated 'pleasure' sensors."
"The key to happiness lies not so much in avoiding pain at all costs as in understanding its role as a protective warning system and harnessing it to work on your behalf, not against you."
"But, as experiences like Robin's show, life does not yield to such easy partitioning. Pain is a part of the seamless fabric of sensations, and often a necessary prelude to pleasure and fulfillment."
"We somehow hope to live full emotional lives when we have carefully expunged the sources of the deepest human emotions. When you have no experience of pain, it is rather hard to experience joy."
"He began with prayers that the pain be removed; he ends with prayers that the pain be redeemed."
"I can read my affliction as a correction, or as a mercy; and I confess I know not how to read it."
"Pain has value in protecting physical bodies—almost everyone grants that."
"Suffering calls our most basic beliefs about God into question."
"Suffering has some moral value in exposing our needful state as mortal creatures on a Groaning Planet."
"Pain never comes to us in general. It comes in specific."
"The important thing, the kingdom of heaven—isn't that a kingdom of the spirit to be worked out inside hearts and minds, not by an external, spectacular display of God's power?"
"Faith like Job's cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken."
"God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain."
"A human tragedy, like blindness, can be used to display God's work."
"We are not put on earth merely to satisfy our desires, to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. We are here to be changed, to be made more like God."
"The presence of suffering puzzles or even enrages those people who assume that human beings are fully formed creatures who need a suitable home."
"Suffering offers an opportunity for us to display God's work."
"The symphony he is composing includes minor chords, dissonance, and tiresome fugal passages."
"God does not 'keep' his people. He loves us, gives himself to us, and eagerly awaits our free response."
"I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted. ... Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know."
"Until you know a little more about running the physical universe, don't tell me how to run the moral universe."
"A God wise enough to rule the universe is wise enough to watch over his child."
"The problem of pain is less a philosophical riddle than a test of human response and faithfulness."
"In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials."
"It was a good kind of sorrow you felt, the kind of sorrow God wants his people to have."
"God does not reveal his grand design. He reveals himself."
"God can bring good out of evil; we cannot say that God brings about the evil in hopes of producing good."
"Friends helped. Joni's most thrilling memory of those early days is of a crazy moment, about a year after her injury, when a friend raced her wheelchair across a sand beach and pushed her into the pounding Atlantic surf. Joni squealed with delight."
"The turning to God was very gradual. A melting in my attitude from bitterness to trust dragged out over three years of tears and violent questioning."
"God became incredibly close to me. I felt myself being transformed by the persistent love of my friends and family."
"I had no other identity but God, and gradually he became enough."
"Maybe God's gift to me is dependence. I will never reach a place of self-sufficiency that crowds God out."
"Peace is internal, and God has lavished me with that peace."
"I now know the meaning of being 'glorified.' It's the time, after my death here, when I'll be on my feet dancing."
"In his book Creative Suffering, the Swiss physician and counselor Paul Tournier recalls his surprise upon reading an article entitled 'Orphans Lead the World.'"
"Suffering, the great equalizer, brings us to a point where we may realize our urgent need for redemption."
"What counts is the way a person reacts in the face of suffering. That is the real test of the person."
"The role of the doctor, nurse, social worker, minister, or loving friend is simply this: to keep the nutcracker of circumstances from destroying, and to help the sufferer see that even the worst hardships open up the potential for growth and development."
"Faith in God was all he had when days were dark and nights were filled with sleepless fear. And in the end God resided in him with evident ease and familiarity."
"The suffering and the poor have the advantage that their lack of self-sufficiency is obvious to them every day."
"Poverty and suffering can serve as instruments to teach us the value of dependence, and unless we learn dependence we will never experience grace."
"But Christianity takes a further step as well. It is called the Resurrection, the moment of victory when the last enemy, death itself, is defeated."
"The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity."
"True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer, and the strength to die. Health is not a condition of my body; it is the power of my soul to cope with the varying condition of that body."
"The most eloquent moments they spent with him were when they sat in silence beside Job for seven days and seven nights before opening their mouths."
"I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid."
"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."
"Mostly we see only a negative meaning in suffering: it interrupts health, and slams an unwelcome brake on our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness."
"None of those cards apply to the people in my ward. None of us will get well. We're all going to die here."
"The most painful part of it was the seeming silence of God."
"One of the most important things we can do for a suffering person is to restore a sense of meaning or significance to the experience."
"In the most important sense, all pain is pain; it does not matter whether the pain comes from migraine headaches or strep throat or acute depression."
"Perhaps the chief contribution a Christian can make is to keep people from suffering for the wrong reasons. We can 'honor' their pain."
"Faith in God may not get you out of the camp, but it is enough to see you through each day."
"The skill of helping another person find meaning involves recognizing various stages along the path to healing."
"At times, despite our best efforts to honor others' pain, we encounter suffering that seems utterly devoid of meaning."
"On the cross, God himself absorbed the awful pain of this world."
"Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross."
"At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice."
"I have no solution to their pain; I have only an answer. And Jesus Christ is that answer."
"Don't forget in the darkness what you have learned in the light."
"By taking it on himself, Jesus dignified pain, showing us how it can be transformed."
"The unimaginable suffering of the cross was fully redeemed: it is by his wounds that we are healed."
"Because of his death and resurrection, we can confidently assume that no trial extends beyond the range of his transforming power."
"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses."
"Our weakness gives opportunity for his strength."
"In my opinion whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has planned for us."
"He is waiting, gathering the armies of good. One day he will unleash them, and the world will see one last terrifying moment of suffering before the full victory is ushered in. Then, God will create for us a new, incredible world. And pain shall be no more."
"We shall not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet."
"The perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality."
"Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?"
"True fulfillment comes, not through comfortable ego-fulfillment, but through service to others."
"Pain is like fertilizer. It stinks when you're around it, and you hate it. But after a while you realize that that despicable stuff provided the nutrients for your growth."
"Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse."