If you are a child of God, you don’t lose your status if you have a bad week.

Just because you can't see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn't mean there can't be one.

We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.

At the end of history the whole earth has become the Garden of God again. Death and decay and suffering are gone. . . . Jesus will make the world our perfect home again. We will no longer be living 'east of Eden,' always wandering and never arriving. We will come, and the father will meet us and embrace us, and we will be brought into the feast.

The determining factor in our relationship with God is not our past but Christ's past.

In the secular view, suffering is never seen as a meaningful part of life but only as an interruption.

Our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture. [We] speak only to the degree we are spoken to.