Mar 08 2008
“Disappointment with God” Quotes
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the great book “Disappointment with God” by Philip Yancey. I love his book, Where is God when it hurts?, which addresses the issues of physical pain and suffering. This book, “Disappointment with God,” looks at the emotional pain of disappointment, which can certainly be a commonly felt emotion as a teenager with chronic pain.
A single, elegant sentence from Isaiah summarizes God’s point of view: “In all their distress he too was distressed.” God may have hidden his face, but that face was streaked with tears. - p. 96
As we saw with Jesus’ time on this earth, his heart was filled with compassion when he saw those ill and hurting. We see him take the time to heal many even when he was grieving over a friend’s death.
If I wonder how God views deformed or disabled people, I can watch Jesus among the crippled, the blind, and those with leprosy. If I wonder about the poor, and whether God has destined them to lives of misery, I can read Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. And if I ever wonder about the appropriate “spiritual” response to pain and suffering, I can note how Jesus responded to his own: with fear and trembling, with loud cries and tears. - p. 137-138
“Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.” - p. 173
By no means can we infer that our own trials are, like Job’s, specially arranged by God to settle some decisive issue in the universe. But we can safely assume that our limited range of vision will in similar fashion distort reality. Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else.
From Job, we can learn that much more is going on out there than we may suspect. Job felt the weight of God’s absence; but a look behind the curtain reveals that in one sense God had never been more present. - p. 264