“Joni Tada has said: "Not everyone can be trusted with suffering. Not everyone can endure a fiery ordeal. So the Master scrutinizes the jewels and carefully selects those which can bear the refining, the branches which can stand the knife. It is given for some to preach, for others to work, for others to give, and for still others to suffer. Where do you fit on the scale? He [God] has selected you to handle that particular, unique, individual set of circumstances in your own life. Not everyone could be trusted with what you're wrestling with, but you have been trusted. The grace is God's. The choice is yours.”
Source: Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace
“Hear Joni Tada once again as she brings this idea home in a powerful manner: "You probably know at least a few disabled people. But did you ever think of the Lord Jesus in that category? No, he didn't have a physical disability, but he did handicap himself when he came to earth...Talk about handicaps! To b e God on one hand...yet to make yourself nothing. What a sever limitation! If you have a handicap, you're not in bad company. If anything, you're in an elite fellowship with Christ himself.”
Source: Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace
“When we begin to do for the least of these what David did for Mephibosheth, and what Jesus called his followers to do, we discover this: we are the broken and the needy. They. Are. Us. Perhaps more openly and undeniably, but all the same, they remind us of our true state before God. That is the gift they bring to God's people.”
Source: Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace
“How many of those bastards lost people on D-day? Politicians start wars but they don't fight them. They cause the trouble and sign the forms and hide when the bombers come. How many of them suffered like I did? Answer me that.”
Source: The Football Factory
“All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover Him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting His way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology. Within the overarching theme of self-donation the theme of solidarity must be fully affirmed, for it underlines rightly the partiality of divine compassion towards the ‘harassed and helpless’.”
Source: Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation
“We have to water the right seeds. If we do that, we can shift our habit energy--that negative loop that contributes to our suffering into mindfulness.”
Source: It's Great to Suck at Something: The Unexpected Joy of Wiping Out and What It Can Teach Us About Patience, Resilience, and the Stuff that Really Matters
“Nothing is lost. That which seems lost is just not confined to this moment.”
Source: Outsiders: The Story of Success
“The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.”
Source: The Black Prince
“It was not Quoyle's chin she hated, but his cringing hesitancy, as though he waited for her anger, expected her to make him suffer.”
Source: The Shipping News
“Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.”
Source: The Black Prince