Quote of the Day
The gospel message doesn’t seek to deny suffering, or minimize its devastation, or explain it away with a lot of happy talk, or make fatuous promises of health and wealth in exchange for prayer and worship. Rather, it tells us that there is a purpose and a reason for it, as difficult as that reason and purpose may be to comprehend let alone embrace. It tells us that we matter, that our lives and actions matter, that “no one lives, and no one dies, save in the embrace of God’s love”.
Tags: Christian Life
September 6th, 2011 at 6:59 pm
I’m sure suffering has had a purpose in my life, but although I’ve suffered more than the average Englishwoman of my age and generation I can put it into the context of other happy and prosperous times. The suffering teaches me a lot, but it’s not all suffering.
When I look at the lives of some in Africa: babies who’ve known nothing but starvation, women repeatedly raped, forced to drag their skeletal children across the war-torn desert and now dying of hunger – I find myself wondering what possible benefit or purpose their suffering can have. These are people whose whole lives have been nothing but suffering.
It is only my faith in an afterlife that gives me hope. I’m no Calvinist – I’m sure God has a welcome for far more people than some human judges would consider proper.
September 6th, 2011 at 7:38 pm
I Often imagine preachers of the “prosperity gospel” going off to preach their stuff to the starving in Africa, because in their ideology, they’re only starving through a lack of faith.
Makes my blood boil…