Quotes about Suffering

God's great, holy joke about the messiah complex is this: Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from it—except one. And he was the Messiah.

The question is, can a human being hold on to God in the face of suffering? After all, suffering is the test of love.

Etty spent her last days giving hope and care, "with a kind word for everyone she met on the way." Her final words were written on a postcard and thrown off Wagon No. 12, the railroad car she rode to what she knew would be her death in Auschwitz. "We left camp singing," she wrote. The Nazis took control of her possessions, her mobility, her work, her family, her body, and finally her life, yet she believed that they did not truly take anything at all.

Dostoyevsky, who was a believer, wrote that the "death of a single infant calls into question the existence of God."1

The character of the faith that allows us to be transformed by suffering and darkness is not doubt-free certainty; rather, it is tenacious obedience.

It therefore behoveth all those who may possibly be called to suffer for the truth in any season, or on any occasion, to assure their minds in this fundamental truth, that they may have in themselves a certain undeceiving understanding of the mind and will of God as revealed in the Scripture, independent on the authority of any church or persons whatsoever; the use of whose ministry herein we do yet freely and fully allow.

Yet in these and the like distresses doth the word of God, by its divine power and efficacy, break through all interposing difficulties, all dark and discouraging circumstances, supporting, refreshing, and comforting such poor distressed sufferers, yea, commonly filling them under overwhelming calamities with "joy unspeakable and full of glory." Though

Do you know the feeling, when your heart is so hurt, that you could feel the blood dripping?

Who knows whether we are right in saying that the sufferings of the divine-human Jesus have the "infinite worth" demanded by the scheme? All such speculations are really quite beyond the limits of our knowing. They are at best conjecture, which for many people, as history shows too plainly, only calls the gospel into question.

I was still searching for someone to blame for my suffering. I really wanted someone to transfer my hate to, so that I could stop hating myself.

In short, these rebels punished their families, but only in the traditionally feminine way: they punished themselves.

Also, despite the belief of population experts that uneducated women wouldn't use birth control, these women knew very well when their own bodies were suffering from too many pregnancies and births. That's why as prime minister, Indira Gandhi took on the controversy of creating the first national family planning program. Her early journeys in those women-only cars had taught her that ordinary women would use it, even if in secret, and literacy had little to do with it.