Resources by Topic: Suffering and Evil

Not surprisingly God and suffering were prominent in the commemorations of 9/11. But missing from most was the observation that there were greater horrors in 2001. This is not to minimize the pain of 9/11 but to sharpen the problem of suffering.

I am writing you this letter so that I will never forget a single part of your short little life within me. Because of you I will never be the same. 

This weekend I received a call from a Christian friend who was deeply troubled. The husband of a woman to whom she had been witnessing had been killed in the World Trade Center attack.

Many Christians are speaking this way about the murderous destruction of the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001. God did not cause it, but he can use it for good. There are two reasons I do not say this. 

How do you pray in the midst of crisis? More than any other portion of Scripture, Psalms shows us how. Beginning with Psalm 3, and over and over again until Psalm 149, we find the psalmist crying out to the Lord in various dire circumstances.

This is the most difficult day of my life. That apparent terrorist attacks could bring such death and destruction to unsuspecting people is absolutely unthinkable. Yet the numbers of the dead and wounded from these attacks will be extraordinary.

A year and a half ago I walked through the Killing Fields in Cambodia. I saw the skulls piled up, and stood by the mudpits where hundreds of bodies were thrown. 

But, as painful as his providence can be, we should trust that he is good, not get angry with him.

Will you show God great in the way you die? Will you say, “To live is Christ and to die is gain”?

It had pleased God to remove my youngest child under circumstances of peculiar trial and pain; and as I had just laid my little one’s body in the churchyard, on return home, I felt it my duty to preach to my people on the meaning of trial.

To overcome stress you must either change your circumstances or your perceptions. You can change some circumstances, of course, but many you cannot.  

Back in 1921, a missionary couple named David and Svea Flood went with their two-year-old son from Sweden to the heart of Africa—to what was then called the Belgian Congo.