thought exercise on Affliction

I was listening to a lecture on friendship to prepare this sermon and the speaker used the movie The Bride of Frankenstein as an illustration. Now, for this to work, you have to put the movie Young...

Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that...

On June 22, 2007, a hit-and-run incident left Daniel McConchie paralyzed from the waist down. McConchie states, “God has not healed my affliction, but he has taught me the power of lamenting to him ab...

“They will look toward the earth and see only distress, darkness, and the gloom of affliction, and they will be driven into thick darkness.” (Isa. 8:22) In The Two Towers , the second novel in Tolki...

We don’t know what we are doing, and I think this is especially true about the way our society deals with mental health. In just the past fifteen years, I have witnessed a massive shift in how evangel...

Before 1348 leprosy is the most terrifying illness which people can imagine. Leprosy is known to us as Hansen’s disease but in the fourteenth century it can include all manner of skin ailments, includ...

I never considered myself a perfectionist before I had children. Perfectionism was someone else’s problem. It was the affliction of those pasty-faced library moles that haunted the campus stacks on Sa...

I sense that mental illness resembles a bone fracture. Bones have remarkable durability, but also, once broken, can rapidly heal and be reset. With normal daily use, one might never be aware of past p...

I love that part in The Silver Chair when old age simply vanishes from frail King Caspian, because age is the unavoidable meltdown, stripping even the bravest and most beautiful of their former glor...

They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

The early church took a view of suffering that stands in testimony to our comfort-addicted culture. For example, Ignatius of Antioch, a martyr in the second century, forbade his community from asking ...

For generations, psychologists thought that virtually all self-defeating behavior was caused by repression. I have now come to believe that addiction is a separate and even more self-defeating force t...

There’s an aphorism repeated often in the writings of the medieval church: per crucem ad lucem, through the cross to the light. God loves us passionately and wants to bring us joy and flourishing, but...

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer describes a surprising dynamic that sometimes occurs in the life of a Christian: believing so strongly in a loving God that one cannot fathom th...

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

Suffering has no answers. But it does carry an invitation. It invites us into mystery. It invites us to surrender without explanation to something we cannot understand. In the dark helplessness of our...

All addictions begin in shame. They don’t begin with troubling behavior—a binge on porn, a night of overdrinking–but with a sense of lack or limitation. An addict may be loved deeply, but sense of lac...

Another form of unholy unhurry that many of us have heard little about is acedia. Derived from the Greek a (for “not”) and keedos (meaning “to care”), acedia is ultimately a failure of love. It’s a pl...

Sin not only alienates; it enslaves. It separates us from God and it also brings us into captivity. We need now to consider the ‘inwardness’ of sin. It is more than the wrong things we do; it is a dee...

In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is...

I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? . . . The point is that he felt huma...

You don’t have to look very far to see awe problems everywhere around you. Adultery is an awe problem. To the degree that you forget God’s glory as the Creator of your body and his place as owner of e...

Curiously enough, it is a fear of how grace will change and improve them that keeps many souls away from God. They want God to take them as they are and let them stay that way. They want Him to take a...

In his classic fictional work on spiritual warfare, The Screwtape Letters , C. S. Lewis imagined a senior demon (Screwtape) corresponding with one of his protégés (his nephew Wormwood) as the latte...

Psychiatrist James Knight describes in graphic detail the experience that members of Alcoholics Anonymous experience: These persons have had their lives laid bare and pushed to the brink of destructi...

An Irish church once had a humorous yet insightful motto that gets at the heart of the pain that often accompanies our relationships: “To dwell above with those we love will certainly be glory. But to...

In the summer of 2012, I knelt over the frail shell of a child, my son, strapped to all manner of medical monitoring equipment. His body failing, his frame thinning, the medical staff at Arkansas Chil...

If I were making a list of benefits like the one Mike McKinley imagines, only this time using the devil’s actual logic, it might look more like this: Experience the excitement of new romance. Get th...

The incarnation means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall . . . to suffer, to be subject to sorrows and death—he has nonetheless had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine....

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in his classic study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity that the term stigma originated with the ancient Greeks, roughly during Jesus’ tim...