speechless

Suffering is difficult to understand.

Jesus suffered. Suffering is something we too will experience. I find it interesting that people ask the question, “If there is a God why is there suffering?” What they are really asking is, “why do I have to suffer?” That is an arrogant question to ask of God. God our heavenly Father permitted His only Son to suffer. How can we dare ask God to not allow us to suffer? Jesus shows us that although there is extreme pain in our world, suffering is dignified. Suffering and death are unexplainable parts of life. We all must endure death. Death is difficult to comprehend. However as Christians we understand that death is not the end of a relationship. We have hope in Christ’s promise that those faithful who go before us are granted eternal life and we pray we may see them again when we too pass from this world to the next.

Have hope because we know the story of Jesus does not end in the tomb, as our story does not end in death either.

Paul Elmer More’s Pages from an Oxford Diary:

This whole dogma of redemption, with its corollaries of pardon and vicarious atonement, was one of the things that kept me long a rebel against Christianity. My philosophy, or my pride, repudiated the thought of suing for forgiveness and of accepting grace. Redemption also seemed to introduce an unreasonable and sentimental element into religion, relaxing the strict bonds of cause and effect upon which the moral law is founded. I liked to contrast the manner in which both Socrates and Buddha in their last moments bade their disciples depend upon themselves and work out their own salvation. I resented the notion that I was not competent to shape my own destiny, that I was not the captain of my own soul.

Well, age and experience, time that knoweth all things, have brought me to look on life with other eyes. I am impressed by the weakness of men and their dependence on help; I see my own humiliating limitations… Oh the battle will be won by him who said, “I have overcome the world.” Surely we have offended and need forgiveness; we are fearful and feeble and need heartening. To fall on our knees and supplicate for that pardon and help seems to me not an abdication of our manhood, but an acknowledgement of our sin, an act of wisdom and of an enlightened will.


More so aptly puts that the incredible movement of man falling to his knees is the truest expression of free will that he has to offer, which is something hauntingly beautiful. The opportunity of man to choose to worship God because God has created man to choose not to, leaves me without words.

So blessed am I, the broken and downtrodden sinner, brought out of the muck and mire and into the light and newness of purity offered by Christ’s atoning death on the cross.