To know that Christ will make all things new doesn’t make the pain go away. We walk through, not around, the valley of the shadow of death. But we walk with the one who holds us, who will get us to the other side, who promises that this life is not all there is. There is a better world coming.

I came across this great quote from The Brothers Karamazov:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

It was in this great CT profile of writer Daniel Nayeri, written by Jonathan Crump. Nayeri has this as the epigram to his beautiful book Everything Sad Is Untrue. I listened to the audiobook a couple of years ago and loved it.

This quote by Dostoevsky was so timely for me to read. The world has always been broken, but sometimes the brokenness inches closer. We have a family in our small group grieving the loss of their son last year. A family in our Christian school just buried a beloved husband, father, and community leader after a sudden, unexpected death. A friend is going through a divorce. Two other friends are enduring cancer. Another friend has a difficult financial situation.

And then I zoom out and see a lot of suffering. I attended the International Religious Freedom Summit last week in Washington, D.C. and learned, afresh, about the severe persecution happening to many Christian brothers and sisters around the world and the oppression of many other minority faiths. I especially think of the brothers I know from Ukraine, whom I met last year. Constant bombing of their cities with promises of peace, but no let-up in the war. I think of the folks in Nigeria, where terrorist radicals routinely kidnap and murder Christians. And here in the US, while we enjoy much freedom and liberty, seemingly intractable social problems divide the country, and Christians spend their days arguing online over which 15-minute Super Bowl halftime show was best. For what it’s worth, I didn’t watch either.

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