thought exercise on Misery

In an old joke, people refer to seminary as cemetery. Attending one does feel like that at times, so the last thing I expected to discover in a dingy classroom in the basement of a Pasadena seminary s...

Those who give, receive back in turn. By spending ourselves for others’ well-being, we enhance our own standing. In letting go of some of what we own, we better secure our own lives. By giving ourselv...

In this tragic world, we are surrounded by discontented people. Every minute of the day, it is possible to see evidence of this restless discontentment in the way people respond to circumstances. Peop...

There is no lack of pain and suffering in the world. Look around. Read the newspaper. Click on the Internet. Scroll Facebook or read a tweet. Suffering is always present like the paparazzi. It seems t...

Years ago, I read an old fairy tale about a wicked witch who lived in a remote cottage in the deep forest. When travelers came through looking for lodging, she offered them a meal and a bed. It was th...

Comparison is the root of most of the misery we feel in life. Comparison makes it impossible to view ourselves from any sort of godly perspective. It is an absolute snare for the soul. Consider what c...

The ultimate reason for our misery, however, is that we do not love God supremely. As Augustine so famously put it in prayer, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they fin...

[M]isery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t invested in you, that isn’t concerned in the slightest for your experience of ...

All our life we are in Advent, since we Christians are still waiting for the one yet to come. Then only will it be said that we were right. Before then, however, the world seems to be right. The world...

When something has gone wrong, justice needs to be done and seen to be done. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement examines exactly this same dynamic. The central character, Bryony Tallis, makes a grave mista...

The streets of Cairo were hot and dusty. Our missionary friends Pat and Rakel Thurman took us down an alley. We drove past Arabic signs to an overgrown graveyard for American missionaries. As Nanci an...

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

In Thanks! I wrote that legendary investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton had posed the question, “How can we get six billion people around the world to practice gratitude?” Not long after Sir ...

The following story comes from the collection of sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt, teaching that would have first been transmitted orally (around 350-450 A.D.) and later written down...

At the 5-mile mark in the Old Kent Riverbank Run a guy passing me said, “Hey buddy, you dropped your key.” There was no getting home without my key. Like a salmon swimming upstream I headed back into ...

In Jeremiah it is clear that the excellence comes from a life of faith, from being more interested in God than in self, and has almost nothing to do with comfort or esteem or achievement. Here is a pe...

A notorious miser was called on by the chairman of the community charity. “Sir,” said the fund-raiser, “our records show that despite your wealth, you’ve never once given to our drive.” The man repli...

For some people the brokenness in these foundational relationships results in material poverty, that is their not having sufficient money to provide for the basic physical needs of themselves and thei...

Material wealth doesn’t make us happy. Listen to some of the wealthiest people of their day: “The care of $200 million is enough to kill anyone. There is no pleasure in it.” W. H. Vanderbilt “I am t...

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...

Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s he...

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a ...

In his play No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre gives his own vision of hell. Two women and a man, doomed to perdition, enter a room that seems to threaten no torment. But they are sentenced to remain together ...

At the airport, Hugh Maclellan Jr. saw an acquaintance who looked troubled. “What’s the matter?” Hugh asked. The man sighed. “I thought I was finally going to have a weekend to myself. But now I have ...

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...

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.

In one of the classic scenes from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, the misfortunate young orphan, Oliver, is stuck in a workhouse, laboring for long hours and getting barely enough gruel to keep h...

The mind in all its intricate beauty can be a place of great anguish. Thoughts can both grip us for the good and plague us for that which is not. In Dickens’ Christmas novella, The Chimes, he describe...

There is an old story] about a man reciting a litany of woes to his friend—he has lost his job, his house, his money, his fiancée—and his friend keeps saying, “It could have been worse.” Finally the m...

To me one of the most terrifying scenes in all of literature is in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman . Willy Loman is a traveling salesman who feels that he is largely a failure. His self-pity...