ON SUFFERING
"It is a very difficult matter to understand when God permits affliction or loss to come into our lives. Our humanity wants to cry out, "Why me God? I love you and faithfully serve you. Why did you permit this sorrow to happen to me?" . . . one reason for affliction is to make us into instruments which will be of greater use to God. For example, a lump of iron ore is violently ripped from its comfortable place in the earth, shipped to a place far away, exposed to melting heat, poured out into a mold, squeezed by rollers, smashed and pounded in a forge, subjected to electric shock to bond other metals to it and later scraped against
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