Pain and suffering are the dark strands through the tapestry of your life, providing the shadows that give depth and dimension to the masterpiece God is fashioning within you.

Religion would certainly be more relevant to the hurting masses of humanity if people could express their hopes and dreams and pain and anguish to one another in the context of religious worship. As it is now our services are so antiseptic and sterile that people gathering for worship relate to others at only the most superficial level, and hardly ever get to know one another. . . . Maybe that is one of the reasons why people feel religion is irrelevant, because they cannot find support and solace during times of crisis and pain. That is when real religion should be at its best.

One of the problems we have is that we cannot just be content to admire and enjoy, we have to possess and feel we own what we see. That can become for many of us an addiction which adds a complication to our life and takes away our peace of mind. Craving things becomes after a while a serious distraction and an obsession.

Only the individual knows to what God is calling him.

Pain and suffering are the dark strands through the tapestry of your life, providing the shadows that give depth and dimension to the masterpiece God is fashioning within you.

But God is never cruel.

We have endless books about whether Jesus existed, or whether the Jesus we have learned about is really accurate and historical or mythical. We have endless complicated tracts on fine technical issues, but we don't explore Jesus' way to happiness and peace, or try to understand his feelings about God and creation of how he views our relationship with God, or his attitude toward human weakness. Understanding these things could help us immensely in our own search for inner peace and a meaning to life.