{"id":547,"date":"2008-06-29T22:55:43","date_gmt":"2008-06-30T02:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/2008\/06\/29\/pain\/"},"modified":"2008-06-29T22:55:43","modified_gmt":"2008-06-30T02:55:43","slug":"pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/?p=547","title":{"rendered":"Pain"},"content":{"rendered":"

And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that <\/em>we release our grasping of life here and now.\u00c2\u00a0 Usually through pain.\u00c2\u00a0 God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to him.\u00c2\u00a0 He thwarts us in our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don’t really look to God for life.\u00c2\u00a0 Our first reaction is usually to get angry with him, which only serves to make the point.\u00c2\u00a0 Don’t you hear people say, “Why did God let this happen?” far more than you hear them say, “Why aren’t I more fully given over to God?”<\/p>\n

We see God as a means to an end rather than the end itself.\u00c2\u00a0 God as the assistant to our life versus God as <\/em>our life.\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t see the process of our life as coming to the place where we are fully his and he is our all.\u00c2\u00a0 And so we are surprised by the course of events.<\/p>\n

It’s not that God doesn’t want us to be happy.\u00c2\u00a0 He does.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that he knows that until we are holy, we cannot really be happy. . . .<\/p>\n

We are so committed to arranging for a happy little life that God has to thwart us to bring us back to himself. . . .<\/p>\n

Now, I am not <\/em>suggesting that God causes all the pain in our lives. . . .\u00c2\u00a0 But pain does come, and what will we do with it?\u00c2\u00a0 What does it reveal?\u00c2\u00a0 What might God be up to?\u00c2\u00a0 How might he redeem our pain?\u00c2\u00a0 those are questions worth asking.<\/p>\n

Don’t waste your pain.<\/p>\n

— John Eldredge, Walking with God, <\/em>p. 87-88<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that we release our grasping of life here and now.\u00c2\u00a0 Usually through pain.\u00c2\u00a0 God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,2,8,19,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god","category-inspiration","category-joy","category-letting-go","category-life","category-trials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}