Affliction is both a medicine if we sin, and a preservative that we sin not.

—Richard Hooker, Anglican priest and theologian (1554-1600)

A few years ago, ChristianityToday.com asked readers to share how much their mothers and grandmothers meant to them. In response, Bill Fix, of Taylor, Michigan, shared a moving testimony about his mother's faithful witness:

[Mom] grew up around the coal mines where her daddy worked, deep in the mountainous regions of Virginia. She came from a large, poverty-stricken family, so she learned how to be ...

In his book The Pressure's Off, psychologist Larry Crabb uses a story from his childhood to illustrate our need to delight in God through adversity:

One Saturday afternoon, I decided I was a big boy and could use the bathroom without anyone's help. So I climbed the stairs, closed and locked the door behind me, and for the next few minutes felt very self-sufficient.

Then it was time to leave. I couldn't ...

The answer to suffering cannot just be an abstract idea, because this isn't an abstract issue; it's a personal issue. It requires a personal response. It's not a bunch of words, it's the Word. It's not a tightly woven philosophical argument; it's a person. The person. The answer must be someone, not just something, because the issue involves someone—God, where are you?"

—Peter J. Kreeft, ...

I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I turn to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness.

That is the God for me. He set aside ...

Research in England revealed that bosses who treat their employees unfairly can cut their lives short. Sixty-four hundred civil servants in London were studied and asked questions like: "Do you ever get criticized unfairly?" "Do you ever get praised for your work?"

Ten years later, it was discovered that men who reported low scores on their bosses' fairness were 30 percent more likely to have coronary ...

Abraham Lincoln went into a severe period of grief in February 1862 when his 11-year-old son, Willie, died.

He found comfort in the words of Presbyterian preacher Reverend Phineas D. Gurley, whose church Lincoln attended but never joined. In the eulogy for Willie, Gurley preached that when tragedy comes, one must look to "him who sees the end from the beginning, and doeth all things well." He also ...

Following the devastation of New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina, Fred Luter surveyed the damage from a helicopter. Luter, pastor of the 7,000-plus member Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, strained to catch sight of his church building from the window of the aircraft. The stench from the water-soaked houses and sludge-covered vehicles below drifted 500 feet in the air.

Finally, Luter spied his church ...

Scott Larson tells the story of a woman who discovered God in the midst of her suffering.

Annette and her husband were missionaries in Western Europe when she began to have pain in her back. When the pain became so unbearable that she could no longer function, even with muscle relaxants, X-rays revealed a tumor the size of a grapefruit that had attached itself to her spinal cord. Though surgery would ...

Helen Roseveare is a British medical doctor who worked for many years as a missionary in Zaire. During the revolution of the 1960s, she often faced brutal beatings and other forms of physical torture. On one occasion, when she was about to be executed, she feared God had forsaken her.

In that moment, she sensed the Holy Spirit saying to her: Twenty years ago you asked me for the privilege of being ...