suffering on Blindness

Victorious Christ Our Sovereign and Savior We cry out for your saving power Reveal your healing and wholeness In our sickness, our suffering Our lamenting, our loss Reveal your healing and wholeness...

Lent 2024: Do This in Remembrance The Sufficiency of Jesus' Sacrifice AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? The times after Jesus’ ascension were both an excit...

Christ saw his afflictions. Afflictions did not blind him, not stupefy him. Afflictions did not make him insensible to affliction (which is a frequent, but a desperate condition). He saw it. And he ma...

Many of us assume that our spiritual heroes do not have to experience the same inner-wrestling that we do. Mother Teresa, beloved across the world is one such figure we might “assume” didn’t have to d...

This is one of the sad conditions of life, that experience is not transmissible. No man will learn from the suffering of another; he must suffer himself.

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...

No human tears are beyond the reach of God’s infinite goodness.

[Speaking of crucifixion] It seems almost inevitable to me that Jesus should go through this kind of darkness. . . . If you think of Jesus as God disguised as a man, then this will have no meaning for...

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

In his book “Where Is God When It Hurts?”, author Philip Yancey shares an unfortunate, yet central dynamic related to how Americans respond to pain: we do everything possible to avoid it. That means p...

A God who cannot suffer is poorer than any human. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely ...

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a ...

I think the mistake most of us make about beauty is that we expect it to be pretty—to please us with its proportions, its balance, its harmony, its rhyme. If those are your requirements, I doubt I wil...

When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.

"Son," he said, "ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,...

Reflection Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 book Dead Man Walking , adapted into a 1995 film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, tells the story of her work with two convicted killers on death row. Sh...

Context 1 Peter is traditionally attributed to the apostle Peter. It is addressed to Christian communities in diaspora, scattered across Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) who were experiencing social ma...

Context 1 Peter is traditionally attributed to the apostle Peter. It is addressed to Christian communities in diaspora, scattered across Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), who were experiencing social m...

To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then, and be “safe”?

God uses chronic pain and weakness, along with other afflictions, as his chisel for sculpting our lives.

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...

Where there’s humility there is majesty; where there’s weakness, there’s might; where there is death, there’s life. If you want to get these things don’t disdain those.

Preaching Commentary Context The Gospel of Mark presents two clear phases of Jesus’ ministry. The first phase (chapters 1-8) takes place in Galilee. It is characterized by words and deeds of power ...

Context This text comes near the midpoint of the Gospel of Mark, and its central narrative position is more than matched by its pivotal thematic content. Jesus has turned from his focus on ministry i...

A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.

Writer Harriet Sarnoff Schiff has distilled her pain and tragedy in a book called The Bereaved Parent. When her young son died during an operation to correct a congenital heart malfunction, her clergy...

Context This text comes near the midpoint of the Gospel of Mark, and its central narrative position is more than matched by its pivotal thematic content. Jesus has turned from his focus on ministry i...

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...