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Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

Book by Tish Harrison Warren · 10 quotes · Suffering, God, Love

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Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep Quotes

“We are topsy-turvy. We don't know what's best for us. The things I'm most afraid of are often the very things that will set me free. The desolate places in my life that I most want to avoid are the very places God waits to meet me. The things I want most - and which I grip, white knuckled - are often the things that, were it not for God's gracious intervention, would diminish me, even kill me. The way to save my life is to lose it.”

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“Suffering strips away the self. This sounds terribly painful, and it is. But the meaning and object of suffering isn't pain; it is to learn to give and receive love. God isn't a sadist who delights in using agony to teach us a lesson. But in the alchemy of redemption, God can take what is only sorrow and transform it into the very path by which we learn to love God and let ourselves be loved. This is the strange (and usually unwanted) way of abundant life - the dying necessary to bring resurrection.”

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“I face things every day, big and small, that are difficult but have not killed me. And I'm finding that what doesn't kill me actually makes me weaker, and maybe that's the point - that the way of glory is discovered through, and only through, the cross. In life's school of love, suffering - what doesn't kill us - makes us more alive to our need and helplessness and, therefore, more able to give and receive love.”

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“To walk through suffering as a Christian - to share in Christ's sufferings - we have to face the darkness. We have to feel the things we hate to feel - sadness, loss, loneliness. We have to drink the bitter cup we've been given. No shortcuts. No free passes. But this is the strange way of true comfort. It's the only way to discover soothing that is substantial enough to bare the weight of our souls.”

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“God loves us passionately and wants to bring us joy and flourishing, but this doesn't preclude a cross. God's love is refracted through the cross, which often makes it hard to see or recognize. But if we are to learn to trust - to place the weight of our lives on the love of God - we can only learn this through the cross. We come to know and trust God's love more deeply through our own crosses, the things that make us feel we cannot go on, the things that make us tired - the job loss, the break up, the sickness, the loneliness, the long struggle with sin, the estrangement from a friend, the disappointment, the deaths of those we love, our own death. I wish there were some easier way, some way to learn to trust God that was paved with luxury and endless ease, but per crucem ad lucem: the way to the light runs smack dab through darkness - or more accurately, we discover the light speeding toward us these very dark places.”

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“But unless we make space for grief, we cannot know the depths of the love of God, the healing God wrings from pain, the way grieving yields wisdom, comfort, even joy. If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make itself heard or we will die trying to silence it. If we don't face it directly it comes out sideways, in ways that aren't always recognizable as grief: explosive anger, uncontrollable anxiety, compulsive shallowness, brooding, bitterness, unchecked addiction. Grief is a ghost that can't be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”

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“There is no yokeless option. It seems to me the weary should be unyoked altogether, but instead Jesus suggests that all people are under a yoke, that it's impossible to not be yoked to someone or something. It may be the yoke of religious law and scrupulous spirituality. It may be the yoke of our desires and passions, as raucous and exhausting as a newborn baby. It may be the yoke of cultural norms and assumptions, the water we swim in. Jesus calls the weary not to follow their own way - that would be a heavy yoke indeed - but to submit to him and learn from him, to take on his yoke... Jesus' yoke is light not because he promises ease or success, but because he promises to bear our burdens with us. He promises to shoulder our load.”

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