life on planet earth on Pain

Pain is not God’s great goof. The sensation of pain is a gift—the gift that nobody wants. More than anything, pain should be viewed as a communication network.

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

So pain endures for a time. Its role is to purge us, to make us to know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord to plead for mercy.

Pain is no evil, unless it conquers us.

Pain removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.

Pain is the most individualizing thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization comes only when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer...

The problem of pain can’t be adequately answered because we don’t primarily want an answer . When all is said and done, we don’t want God to simply explain himself, to give an account of how hurrican...

When pain is this fresh and this awful, I’m not sure much light can get through. You have to wait for some of the initial jolt to subside, to let something settle enough that you can emerge from being...

Princess Buttercup: “You mock my pain. Man in Black: Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.

Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

We are always bigger than the pain we feel. Always. The pain is not total. When you say “I am in pain,” there is the pain and there is the I but the I is always bigger than the pain. Because the I is ...

If you do not transform your pain, you will surely transmit it.

Books on the problem of pain divide neatly into two groupings. The older ones, by people like Aquinas, Bunyan, Donne, Luther, Calvin, and Augustine, ungrudgingly accept pain and suffering as God’s use...

"One learns of the pain of others by suffering own’s own pain, my father would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said."

I learned a long time ago that if I hustle fast enough, the emptiness will never catch up with me. First I outran it by traveling and dancing and drinking two-for-one whiskey sours at Calypso on State...

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

What’s the difference between avoiding pain and seeking appropriate comfort? I have a friend who says, “The first episode of my favorite TV show is soothing. But if I’m watching the fifth episode in a...

I (Rich) remember a time while serving as a young pastor at Peace Community Church. At the beginning of my sermon every single Sunday an elderly believer in the church tilted his head to the right and...

In spite of sorrow, loss, and pain, our course be onward still; we sow on Burmah's barren plain, we reap on Zion's hill.

How singular is the thing called pleasure and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it . . . yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; t...

So we learn early on that lack is embarrassing. Our pain is uncomfortable not just for ourselves but for those around us. Our need is obscene and offensive to a world that prides itself on its self-re...

Not one thing in your life is more important than figuring out how to live in the face of unspoken pain.

I was wholly at peace, at ease and at rest, so that there was nothing upon earth which could have afflicted me. This lasted only for a time, and then I was changed…I felt there was no ease or comfort ...

“Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and bette...

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a Go...

Paradoxically…healing means moving from your pain to the pain…When you keep focusing on the specific circumstances of your pain, you easily become angry, resentful, and even vindictive. You are inclin...

God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain, because we are committed to him, not to our own good feelings and rewards. He wants us to cleave to him, as Job did, eve...