“After all, “we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses...””
:)
About suffering:
We all do it more or less.
But, especially we who are or were in the “helping professions” encounter people who seem to have an amazing portion of suffering in their lives. We often shuffle the saddest cases out of public view, but what shall we as bearers of the Word say to them? What shall we think?
I say this tentatively, as sharing a thought, a fancy, among brethren:
Lately it has seemed inescapable to me that some must be called to suffer — not to seek suffering but to bear the large portion of suffering that has been dealt to them and to ‘offer it up’ (as we papists are notorious for saying.)
How else to explain a child born with a wasting muscular disease who will probably not live to see 30? Not that God inflicted the suffering, necessarily, but that making one’s life and one’s pain an offering is the only evangelical alternative.