God always seems bigger to those who need him most. And suffering is the tool he uses to help us need him more.

Most people wish they could erase suffering out of the dictionary. Today's culture of comfort and instant gratification has no patience for suffering - most people want to drug it, escape it, divorce it; do anything but live with it.

I want to stay in the habit of 'glancing' at my problems and 'gazing' at my Lord.

There is nothing that moves a loving father's soul quite like his child's cry.

True, God hates Alzheimer's, spinal cord injury, mental illness, autism, and the rest (these conditions are all symptoms of the Fall). Yet he permits these things to accomplish something far more precious in our lives: patience, endurance, compassion for others who hurt, and refined faith and trust in God, to name a few.

Even at the cross, God permitted what he hated - the unjust and agonizing death of his own precious Son - in order to accomplish something he prized above his own Son's cruel death; that is, salvation for a world of sinners. So the world's worst murder becomes the world's only salvation.

Even in my despair, I knew in a vague way that the Bible held hope for me in its pages. I just didn't know where to begin.