“When you grieve, that’s all you tend to see. You must move through this time of suffering, strengthening your faith and being willing to grow. As you grow you’ll find that your blind faith will continue to open your eyes.”

“We chose to turn away from God, including his laws. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not have false idols (anything you put before God, including power—the kind that tries to wipe out a race of humans, for example). When we turned away from Him, we turned away from his goodness. When laws are broken, people are broken. All hell broke loose, because we had the choice to allow it. He gave us free will. Think about it—even if you could force your crush to love you, would it be real love? Would you want that for someone you really love? God feels the same way. He would rather risk being hated because you had a choice to hate him than have everyone love Him because they were forced to. This chaos isn’t God’s fault, it’s ours. Then we ask, why didn’t God come down and stop the Holocaust? Oh, it’s not just the holocaust. People still kill each other today, ISIS as an example. To answer the question: first, if God did come down, would we recognize Him? How would we know it was Him? And didn’t He do just that in sending Jesus? And so many of the human race don’t believe He even did that! So what makes you think you would recognize Him now? Second, He did do something about the suffering—He created us. Those who really understand Christ’s heart would not only believe, but do something about it.”

“Our task [as Christians] is to be faithful to the calling of the cross; to live in God’s new world as the agents of his love,and to pray that the cross we carry today will become part of the healing and reconciliation of the world. We will not understand in the present time how it is that our pain, our illness, our heartbreak, our deep frustration, is somehow taken up into the pain of God and the healing of the world; but if we offer it back to God that is precisely what will happen.”

“The only advantage of knowledge is that it can justify suffering.”

“This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.”

“The beauty of the sea is that it never shows any weakness and never tires of the countless souls that unleash their broken voices into its secret depths.”

“When shall I be dead and rid Of all the wrong my father did? How long, how long ’till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother’s curse?”

“The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.”

“if you are suffering without a belief in God, then there is not a lot of hope that your pain has any greater purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. Suffering is just a part of naturalistic evolution weeding you out of existence for something stronger and younger to take your place on the food chain.”

“Eventually, it boils down to two choices – do I wish to experience this physical reality primarily through joy or do I want to experience it through suffering? That’s all there is to it. And since each person eventually works their way toward the realization that conscious expansion can happen through joy rather than suffering – enlightenment is a natural byproduct.”

“If this turns to friendship, it only meansThat one of us will suffer.That when we meet after the worst of endings,There will only be this skein of words between us—Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness—Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leavingBehind a bluer sky each moment of departure.And one of us will cling on to its blue,Hung on partings like a muted cloud, whileThe other rides on a wing of word away from here.”

“The name outlaw Christian describes the kind of Christian I am and the kind I’m setting myself free to become: namely, a follower of Jesus who no longer accepts cocky clichés, hackneyed hope, or snappy theodicies—defenses of God’s goodness and power—that explain away evil and suffering with a theo-magical sleight of hand. An outlaw Christian doesn’t condemn questions or discourage doubt. Instead, an outlaw Christian seeks to live an authentic life of faith and integrity, and chooses the defy the unwritten laws governing suffering, grief, and hope that our culture and religious traditions have asked us to ingest. The faith of an outlaw Christian is bold, outspoken, and active in a world of pain.”

“Suffering makes a man to seek for his Saviour.”

“Suffering awakes the spiritual soul of the spirit.”

“Pushkin could cry hot tears, and he who can weep can hope. “I want to live, so that I may think and suffer,” he says; and it seems as if the word “to suffer,” which is so beautiful in the poem, just fell in accidentally, because there was no better rhyme in Russian for “to die.”