God wants to free us from ourselves, and there's nothing like suffering to show us that we need something bigger than our abilities and our strength and our explanations.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There's nothing like suffering to remind us how not in control we actually are, how little power we ultimately have, and how much we ultimately need God.
Indeed, there is nothing like suffering to remind us how much we need God. What good news that His purpose and plan for our lives moves in a different direction from ours!
Suffering is part of the divine idea.
We may not ever fully understand why God allows the suffering that devastates our lives. We may not ever find the right answers to how we'll dig ourselves out.
Suffering makes a people greater, and we have suffered much. We had a message to give the world, but we were overwhelmed, and the message was cut off in the middle. In time there will be millions of us - becoming stronger and stronger - and we will complete the message.
God has created us and poured love into our hearts so that we may do our best to alleviate the suffering that is around us.
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
God steps into the suffering with us, and He takes it on himself, and He walks through it with us, and He uses it to create something in you that is unstoppable.
For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God's chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be Himself for you. And in the end, what we discover is that this really is enough.
The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.