Out of Sorts by Sarah Bessey

This is a picture of Out of Sorts by Sarah Bessey, which I finished a couple days ago. I tried a new method of using little post-it notes to help me mark and be able to go back to pages where I'd underlined things I thought were significant. This photo is when I was about a third of the way through. I wondered if my new method would be very helpful, but I just now wanted to find a passage about God's will that I knew was in the book, and the post-its did help! I was able to find the passage more easily. So there you go.

I am going to write out the passages about God's will that I referred to. I have a Facebook friend who is the daughter of a longtime friend and fellow reader who passed away from cancer. I want the daughter to see the passage. Later, I may write more on other significant parts of the book.

...too often we seek to comfort with the platitudes that have held the Church captive for years: God is all-powerful, God could have stopped it, God didn't stop it, therefore this--all this--is God's plan for us.

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The problem with this quick shot of comfort...is it ends up filling our heads with the wrong idea of God while perhaps absolving us of our complicity.We pit our pain against God, holding tally and requiring meaning, instead of saying the truth: This isn't God's will. This is completely against what God wants for us. And it's wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

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Simply blaming God or blaming ourselves fails to recognize the truth that we are in a war zone. The world is complex, ambiguous at times, and so yes, evil things often happen because we live in a fallen world of free agents. We don't always escape the evil in this world, and we don't always find victory in this life, but the core belief I was given at the start is true: God is not to blame.

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He is not the origin of evil nor does He "use" evil as a means to justify some cosmic end. Rather God fights evil.

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When Jesus was confronted with people who suffered, He never offered platitudes, did He? ... Jesus offered compassion, even tears at times,

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God is always on the side of suffering wherever it is found, and God's endgame is resurrection.

--Out of Sorts by Sarah Bessey, published by Howard Books, copyright 2015, pages 185-189