The Value of Affliction

Affliction is both a medicine if we sin, and a preservative that we sin not.

—Richard Hooker, Anglican priest and theologian (1554-1600)

Sitting with God on the Bathroom Floor

In his book The Pressure's Off, psychologist Larry Crabb uses a story from his childhood to illustrate our need to delight in God through adversity: ...

The Answer to Suffering Is Personal

The answer to suffering cannot just be an abstract idea, because this isn't an abstract issue; it's a personal issue. It requires a personal response. ...

Why God Permits What He Hates

God permits what he hates in order to accomplish what he loves.

Blind to the Suffering World

Poet T.S. Eliot writes:

We have seen the young man mutilated, The torn girl trembling by the millstream. And meanwhile we have gone on living ... We have ...

The "Why" to Live

When Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl was arrested by the Nazis in World War II, he was stripped of everything--property, family, possessions. He had ...

Nourishing Tears

The same tears that break our hearts may also nourish us in ways that matter most to God.

Suffering Is Never Meaningless

Suffering can never ultimately be meaningless, because God himself has shared it.

Reconciling God and Suffering

It is good to learn early enough that suffering and God are not a contradiction but rather a unity, for the idea that God himself is suffering is one ...

Your God Is My Devil

In his spiritual autobiography, William Barclay, the venerable Scottish scholar, tells the tragedy of losing his 21-year-old daughter and her fiancee ...