Quotes about Suffering

We were shoved against the back wall. Thirty or forty people were all that could fit in. And still the soldiers drove women over the side, cursing, jabbing with their guns. Shrieks rose from the center of the car but still the press increased. It was only when eighty women were packed inside that the door thumped shut and we heard iron bolts driven into place.

On my closed eyelids the sun glimmered and blazed. "It says," I began slowly, "that a Light has come into this world, so that we need no longer walk in the dark. Is there darkness in your life, Lieutenant?" There was a very long silence. "There is great darkness," he said at last. "I cannot bear the work I do here.

Surely there is no more wretched sight than the human body unloved and uncared for.

I looked at my sister kneeling beside me in the light of burning Holland. "Oh Lord," I whispered, "listen to Betsie, not me, because I cannot pray for those men at all.

It was a fact. We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute—poor, hated, hungry. We are more than conquerors. Not "we shall be." We are! Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.

In 1959 Corrie was part of a group that visited Ravensbruck, which was then in East Germany, to honor Betsie and the 96,000 other women who died there. There Corrie learned that her own release had been part of a clerical error; one week later all women her age were taken to the gas chamber.

Jesus can turn loss into glory.

A. W. Tozer, who said, "It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply.

When you start to avoid what hurts you, what happens? Over time, your spiritual side grows stronger. And your selfish side starts to die.

Pain in the moment, and hope for the future. But sometimes the pain seems to yell, while hope only whispers.

Pause for a moment and prayerfully consider your response: What breaks your heart?

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul.