Where is god when it hurts philip yancey

Romans Sometimes I think — very rarely, as in the case of the man born blind — the works of God can be manifest in the miracle of healing. More often, it is parents who live with a disabled child. Joni in wheelchair campaigning for disability rights in the United States. Photo via Joni and Friends media. I remember interviewing her almost 40 years ago. I was working for a youth magazine, Campus Life , and Joni was still a very young person.

She had no idea what her future would be like. She was still hurt, and depressed, and upset, and angry, and ashamed. But now my life has meaning and purpose. Just like when you have a bruise somewhere on your I read this book a while ago, but the one thing that I remember from it is that pain serves as a warning sign to us human beings that something is wrong with this world- of course we all know that.

Just like when you have a bruise somewhere on your body, pain "protects" you from further harm, telling you to seek help and try to soothe that wound.

While this may sound incredulous, imagine us not bring able to feel pain at all- for instance, if you put your hand on a hot stove and after burning your hand for a while you still don't feel anything.

That would be pretty dangerous because before you know it, you would've lost your hand completely. Where is God when it hurts? He is here and He has always been and forever will be.

Just seek Him out. Don't give up. Jan 26, Michael rated it it was ok. If you are in pain and trial, and looking for answer to "why? I do not deserve all of that, " this book can give you answers. Unfortunately, not to your specific question. The answer for that, according to the author, is that God never answered Job when he asked same question, but only lectured him about His wisdom page and next few pages.

However, you will find answers about the benefits of pain signals of malfunction, personal growth,.. The book could be If you are in pain and trial, and looking for answer to "why? The book could be skimmed significantly without losing its point. Same criticism is valid for his other books.

He also copies verbatim from his other books. Jan 28, Samantha Mcdade rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: anyone. Someone with real feelings. It was refreshing to see a person write from the perspective of a questioning and afraid Christian.

It really is okay to wonder sometimes. Feb 18, Rob rated it it was amazing Shelves: inspiration. This is one of the most powerful books I have been impacted by. I read it shortly after experiencing one of the most devastating losses in my life. Jul 13, Alyssia Cooke rated it it was amazing Shelves: nonfiction , religious. Sorry, I appear to have moved back onto theology books but this is a fantastic book of theology. It has won the Gold Medallion award and has been a best-seller for over fifty years, and this edition is the revised edition by the author so he could explore issues that had arisen during this time.

Philip Yancey uses this book as an opportunity to discuss pain - physical, emotional and spiritual - in such a way as to help both the reader and himself to understand why we suffer from pain and how we Sorry, I appear to have moved back onto theology books but this is a fantastic book of theology.

Philip Yancey uses this book as an opportunity to discuss pain - physical, emotional and spiritual - in such a way as to help both the reader and himself to understand why we suffer from pain and how we can cope with either our own pain or the pain of others.

The first section is asking why pain exists when nobody wants it, the experiences of leprosy with the inability to feel pain, and the fine line between pain and ecstasy. The second sections asks whether pain is a message from God, looking at suffering through the world and the philos0phy behind it.

It explores how much of suffering is based on the abuse of human freedom, what God could be trying to tell us and explores the idea that we have arms too short to box with God. The third section explores how people respond to suffering and this is a section based entirely on the stories of people who have gone through extreme accidents and suffering which shows their personal experiences.

The fourth part is an exploration of how we can cope with pain including the borders of recovery and the emotions we can find ourselves going through including fear, helplessness, meaning and hope.

And the fifth section is concerned with how faith can help those people who are suffering. The final section is a discussion guide meant for groups with tips on how to lead a discussion group as well as specific questions relating to each chapter in the book.

He notes that despite how protective this complex network of pain sensor is, it is by far the most unappreciated bodily system. However, Yancey is suggesting that pain is not the one mistake that God made, but is instead the complete opposite, it bears the mark of creative genius. This is a scientific look at the reasons behind pain, and how it is necessary because humans ignore all other warnings no matter how many times we are warned. Painless Hell - Here Phillip Yancey explores the disease of leprosy and how it can easily be used to show what a mess we find ourselves in when we cannot feel the gift of pain.

Because leprosy works as an anaesthetic, the leprosy patients unwittingly expose themselves to terrible abuse including burning themselves and cutting themselves to the bone.

He then goes through the individual cases of several patients at the Carville walk in centre, and comes to the conclusion that pain gives us freedom because those without it need 'the gift of pain' to do the simplest of things without hurting themselves. This is a look at pain which few of us will ever have seen, and I think we can be truly grateful for that. But it is a very interesting view considering how little we usually know about the topic.

Agony and Ecstasy - Phillip Yancey suggests that pain and joy are both joined very closely together and because we dull our sense of pain by taking drugs immediately, we find it harder to truly experience joy. He illustrates this by describing two graphs, one with a peak at each end and a trough in the middle, suggesting pain and pleasure go at either ends and with quiet normal living in the middle. With this graph the aim would be to face firmly towards happiness. The second graph is the one which Phillip Yancey finds more realistic and that is a graph with a single peak and a surrounding plain, the peak would be Life with a capital L - the place where happiness and pain meet.

The surrounding plain would be sleep, apathy or death. And earth, though God's showplace, is a good creation that has been bent. To understand pain we must step away from the microscope and look into the face of agonised human beings. Much of our suffering on our planet comes from human freedom, which in turn leads to abuse.

We can easily say that God is responsible for the suffering of the world, but giving a child a pair of ice skates knowing that he may fall, is very different from knocking him down on the ice. Phillip Yancey is more or less saying that we have a choice; we can trust in God or we can blame God rather than ourselves.

Suffering is the megaphone of God. What is God Trying to tell us - The most difficult time to even consider that God might be trying to warn you of something or tell you something is either when children die or when someone close to you does. And you are left wondering why you survived when they died.

Many people will not have thought about God in years, but when faced with suffering many of us lash out in anger towards God. It has been said that suffering is easier to deal with as an atheist because then it is just chance, but if you believe in a world ruled by an all powerful God then it makes things more difficult.

Phillip Yancey uses biblical quotes to show this in a different perspectives and to suggest different ways to look at what the Bible says. What we need to remember is that Jesus always used his powers to heal, not to punish. Why are we here? The Book of Job will always be a difficult one, but Phillip Yancey uses it to argue human freedom and God's will for us to love him no matter what.

He uses Christian philosophy such as life being a 'vale of soul-making' to explore that pain and suffering are the only ways to gain generosity, kindness, courage and fortitude because anyone can be brave when there is nothing to fear. This is often a difficult idea for us to accept but Yancey portrays it very sensitively.

Arms too short to box with God - This chapter also focuses on the Book of Job, but instead of asking why Job suffered such hardship it is exploring God's response to Job's complaints. He was aggressive rather than comforting and side-stepped 35 chapters of debate on the problem of pain. God overwhelms Job with questions about his power and how Job could do none of what God has done. He doesn't explain. He explodes. Yancey is also suggesting that suffering is a way to bring us to God, suffering has a purpose because it changes us and builds perseverance and character.

He explores the depression, the way other people responded and how they themselves dealt with their condition. This is another very interesting view on problems which hopefully we will never have to face, and it show the strength and the frailty of human beings with an amazing tenderness.

Other Witnesses - Phillip Yancey here looks at different people who see suffering in both their personal and professional lives and explores their views on it. One of the analogies used by a doctor is that of a nutcracker, and that unforeseen calamities can break through the outer shell of personal security but it need not destroy us.

It is then the job of doctors, priests, and friends to ensure that this nutcracker does not destroy us. This is kind of a look at how we can help those in extreme suffering as it is often very easy to make things ten times worse. He also explores what we can do to help, and what we can say or do even though there is never a completely correct option.

In the rest of this section he explores the frontiers of fear, helplessness, meaning and hope which are the areas which every suffering person will have to battle. Fear and helplessness are universal responses to suffering, both to the person who is in pain and those who are close to them.

The fear of what is happening and the knowledge that you can not do anything about it can be one of the worst things to go through. Meaning is something that is very important for people to find; a purpose to life, even if the only meaning that can be found is the fact that someone cares about them.

And finally hope, which Phillip Yancey singles out as one of the most significant factors for coping with pain. It is an illusive quality, but however pointless it may appear at any given moment in time it is necessary. Optimism and wishful thinking may be a denial of reality, but the belief that something good lies ahead is essential. At the very worst, the Christian hope of the resurrection can be very calming and a massive relief to people.

But what Yancey is reminding us of is that God did intervene in the form of Jesus, and whatever reasons he may have had for making us subject to sorrows and death, he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Jesus died on the cross at our hands and he did it willingly to save us from our sins. Although this does not remove pain from our lives it does show that God does not idly sit by and watch us suffer, he became one of us.

Yancey also explores the other help that Christianity offers and he ends the chapter by exploring the hope of resurrection. Why we have pain and suffering, why we need it, what we can do about it, how we cope with pain and how faith can help, or for that matter hinder, people in extreme suffering.

It is thoughtful, provoking and interesting, and Yancey uses religion calmly and without trying to convert or insult. As a religious book based on the subject of pain it could have been so full of religious references as to be more or less useless to anyone who is not directly looking for a Christian perspective and who knows the ins and outs of the arguments already.

Instead he has set the book out so that it can be a useful resource for anyone whether religious or not as it covers the issues scientifically as well as spiritually and doesn't work on the principle that if you are reading the book you must be Christian. The range of issues he covers is quite amazing and he always covers them sensitively and without preaching.

He fully understands and accepts that he doesn't know the answers and he cannot speak for everyone, but he has researched the issues thoroughly and has written this book with the true purpose of helping people.

It is however very in depth and can be a bit of a struggle to get through at points. This is not a book which you can pick up and read through in one sitting, it is just too in depth and too detailed.

I tended to read it in short sittings, probably a chapter or even a section of a chapter at a time and I found that this worked very well. But, because of how it is written this book is also very comforting and helpful whether you are going through issues, have been through issues which you have never fully resolved or are watching people you love struggle. Phillip Yancey is a fantastic and sensitive writer and he writes without ever slipping into the lecturing style that will quickly bore the reader.

Shelves: christian. A theological exploration of pain 14 January Disappointment with God seemed to have covered a lot of ground that this book ended up covering and I noted that at the beginning of the other book Yancey had made a comment that he had decided to write Disappointment with God to tackle the issue of, for want of a better word, bad luck in general beyond the issue of physical pain.

However as I was reading this book I began to realise that you cannot actually separate the two, and whether it be phy A theological exploration of pain 14 January Disappointment with God seemed to have covered a lot of ground that this book ended up covering and I noted that at the beginning of the other book Yancey had made a comment that he had decided to write Disappointment with God to tackle the issue of, for want of a better word, bad luck in general beyond the issue of physical pain.

However as I was reading this book I began to realise that you cannot actually separate the two, and whether it be physical pain or disability, such as somebody losing the use of their arms and legs; or chronic pain, such as somebody with cancer suffers or emotional pain, such as the loss of a job, a wife, or general defamation of character, the principles are the same, and that is the question of 'if God is a good God, why is it that my life basically sucks?

One thing that came out of this book is that people who ask that question and run around trying to elicit pity because of the short straw that apparently they have drawn generally suffer from defeatism and are very self focused. I can say that because I have been there and I have behaved like that and still do in some cases.

The problem is that one of the ways we tackle people like that is by giving them a metaphorical slap across the face and telling them to wake up and smell the coffee, however that does not always work, and the people that we do this too end up resenting us more for doing that and I know that because, once again, I was one of those people. This book does not seek to solve the problem of pain and suffering just in the same way that Disappointment with God does not seek to solve it either however what it does do is that it explores the world in which we live and tries to create a context for us to understand where we currently stand.

First of all we must remember that we are living in a fallen world, one that has rebelled against God's rule, and in doing so is facing the consequences. I am not saying that we are individually being punished, but rather that we as a race have chosen to live our lives separate from God, and as such we are facing the consequences of that decision.

Secondly, this state of being is only temporary, and while in our minds the seventy odd years that we have to live in this world may seem like an eternity, we need to keep our minds focused on the ultimate goal ahead, which in many ways we are looking at only through a lens of faith because we cannot actually see the exact nature of that goal, but can only go by what has been revealed to us in our limited understanding of the multiverse as a whole.

The other context that Yancey defines an understanding of pain. Many of us do not realise this but pain is a warning system that tells us that something is wrong.

For instance if we put our hand too close to a flame we get a sensation that tells us that this is bad. If we step on glass and cut our foot, we get pain to tell us that something is wrong and we must do something about it. Take away that pain and we are in a lot of trouble.

In fact Yancey goes and visits a leper colony to explore what it is like to live in a world without pain, and the results are not pretty.

If we do not experience pain then we do not know that we have stepped on that piece of glass, and the wound goes untreated, becomes infected, and we end up losing our entire leg.

The second aspect is what one can call 'the fine line between pleasure and pain'. In many cases what at one point is pain can at another point be incredibly pleasurable. For instance stroking a bed of nails could cause pain, however stroking the fur of a cat could be quite pleasurable if it does not turn around and attack you that is. What Yancey is showing us here is that the pain receptors also act as pleasure receptors and to remove the pain receptors such as is the case with lepers means that we also lose the ability to experience pleasure.

The other aspect is the saying 'no pain no gain' or 'that which does not kill me only makes me stronger'. It is the mantra of many a sporting team, where to reach the ultimate goal of victory whether it be that one game, or it be the championships one must go through immense amounts of pain, such as exhaustion, injuries, and general wear and tear.

While I do have some issues with the modern nature of competitive sport, the actual concept of sport, and of struggling through the match to achieve that goal of victory or even for some people, simply finishing the race — winning the race is never going to be a possibility is a noble goal. The thing is to reach that point, that joy, that ecstasy, of completing the race, one must push oneself through barriers of pain to get there.

Yancey also spends some time looking at people who have had a rather nasty turn in their life both of them being quadraplegics, and both of them developing the condition where they have nobody to blame but themselves. Now, what Yancey shows us is that they could have spent their time wallowing in their misery, kicking and blaming themselves or others for their misfortune, or hiding away in nursing homes waiting to die.

However they have not done that, but rather, and while it is an immense struggle to do so, they have said that they are in this condition, and wallowing in self pity is not going to do anything about it. Now, I am sure we could think of hundreds of people spend their time wallowing in self pity, and we could simply write off these other two as feel good stories that one would expect to come out of Reader's Digest does that still exist?

To simply write them off as your average Reader's Digest feel good story or motivational story is to push you into the realm of the self-pity seeker. There is one person that I can actually tell you about in that situation, and that is my brother.

When he was born he was born weeks premature in the car on the way to the hospital. When my parents finally got to the hospital he was put in the oxygen tent and the doctors stuffed up the oxygen settings resulting in him suffering irreparable brain damage. Now my parents could have sued the doctors for negligence, but they didn't which surprises me, but that was their choice, a choice that I would have made differently because of my understanding of the legal and compensation system.

Instead they simply accepted the fact that one of their children was going to be special, and got on with their life. I must admit that it wasn't easy, for me at least, since being the oldest, and normal if there is such a thing as normal I was basically left to my own devices and required to make my own way in the world where most of the attention fell on to my brother and my sister.

However if you were to meet my brother, while there is an understanding that he is different, there is also the fact that be basically doesn't care. He is who he is and he accepts who he is, and he goes through life as such. You rarely see him complain unless of course he is pushed to his limits, and I must admit that there are people out there that will complain at the drop of a hat, and my brother is not one of them.

He knows that there will be no cure for his condition, and he knows that he is stuck with it for life, so instead of wallowing in self pity, he simply gets up and enjoys the life that has been given to him.

In the end I guess that that is the basic moral of this book, and that is that yes, there is pain and suffering in this world, and yes, we are going to be affected by it, and yes, life is unfair, however God also understands this, and if we look at the incarnation of Jesus Christ we can see him going through all of the same experiences that we have gone through.

Was God ever paralysed? Yes, as he hung on that cross. Was God ever mocked and ridiculed? Was God ever deserted by his friends? Ever cut down by so called experts? Ever rejected by his family? The answers to all those questions is yes, so while it seems at times that God is distant, it is still the case that he can empathise with us because he has been through all of that as well. Jul 19, Mr. I might be more detailed in this later so there might be a modification to this, but this really was a good book.

I don't even recall who told me about this one I'll have to look on Twitter , but I didn't know what to expect. And I didn't know a lot about things that the book presented to me as well for example, I didn't know all of what it described about what leprosy does to a person I like how Mr. Yancey seems to not be trying to answer where the Bible I might be more detailed in this later so there might be a modification to this, but this really was a good book.

Yancey seems to not be trying to answer where the Bible doesn't of course Job is mentioned a lot , but tries his best to "present the possibles" when it comes to pain and suffering in the Christian life. With emphasis on that as well: I've read two books recently that come from a general But the strength and beauty of age is spiritual.

It makes us more eager to leave behind the temporary, deteriorating part of us and be truly homesick for our eternal home. If we stayed young and strong and beautiful, we might never want to leave! We are here to be changed, to be made more like God in order to prepare us for a lifetime with him. And that process may be served by the mysterious pattern of all creation: pleasure sometimes emerges against a background of pain, evil may be transformed into good, and suffering may produce something of value.

When I stub my toe or twist an ankle, pain loudly announces to my brain that something is wrong. Similarly, the existence of suffering on this earth is, I believe, a scream to all of us that something is wrong. It halts us in our tracks and forces us to consider other values. Nor does it offer insurance against feelings of doubt and betrayal. If anything, being a Christian complicates the issue.

If you believe in a world of pure chance, what difference does it make whether a bus from Yuba City or one from Salina crashes? But if you believe in a world ruled by a powerful God who loves you tenderly, then it makes an awful difference. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering.

All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus. He co-authored three books with the renowned surgeon Dr.

Paul Brand. His books have garnered 13 Gold Medallion Awards from Christian publishers and booksellers. He currently has more than 15 million books in print, published in 35 languages worldwide. Yancey worked as a journalist in Chicago for some twenty years, editing the youth magazine Campus Life while also writing for a wide variety of magazines including Reader's Digest, Saturday Evening Post, National Wildlife, and Christianity Today.

In the process he interviewed diverse people enriched by their personal faith, such as President Jimmy Carter, Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller, and Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement. In he and his wife Janet, a social worker and hospice chaplain, moved to the foothills of Colorado. His writing took a more personal, introspective turn even as his activities turned outward. My interests include skiing, climbing mountains, mountain-biking, golf, international travel, jogging, nature, theology in small doses , politics, literature, and classical music.

I feel overwhelming gratitude that I can make a living writing about the questions that most interest me. My books are a process of exploration and investigation of things I wonder about and worry about. So, just how does a man who's been through all Yancey has, draw close to the God he once feared? He spends about an hour each morning reading spiritually nourishing books, meditating, and praying. This morning time, he says, helps him 'align' himself with God for the day.

To those who struggle with my books, I reply, 'Then maybe you shouldn't be reading them. Yet some people do need the kinds of books I write. They've been burned by the church or they're upset about certain aspects of Christianity. I understand that feeling of disappointment, even betrayal. I feel called to speak to those living in the borderlands of faith. Where is God When It Hurts?