A Response to Suffering

[In response to answering the suffering in the world]:
"It's Jesus himself. 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 to suffering cannot just be an abstract idea, because this isn't an abstract idea; it's a personal issue. It requires a personal response. The answer must be someone, not just something, because the issue involves someone-- God, where are you?.... Jesus is there, sitting beside us in the lowest places of our lives. Are we broken? He was broken, like bread, for us. Are we despised? He was despised and rejected of men. Do we cry out that we can't take anymore? He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Do people betray us? He was sold out himself. Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was rejected. Do people turn from us? They hid their faces from him as from a leper. Does he descend into all our hells? Yes, he does. From the depths of a Nazi death camp, Corrie ten Boom wrote: 'No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still.' He not only rose fom the dead, he changed the meaning of death and therefore of all the little deaths-- the sufferings that anticipate death and make up parts of it. He is gassed in Auschwitz. He is sneered at in Soweto. He is mocked in Northern Ireland. He is enslaved in the Sudan. He's the one we love to hate, yet to us he has chosen to return love. Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not wipe them away yet, but he will.... In the end, God has only given us partial explanations.... Maybe that's because he saw that a better explanation wouldn't have been good for us. I don't know why. As a philosopher, I'm obviously curious. Humanly, I wish he had given us more information.... But he knew Jesus was more than an explanation. He's what we really need. If your friend is sick and dying, the most important thing he wants is not an explanation; he wants you to sit with him. He's terrified of being alone more than anything else. So God has not left us alone. And for that, I love him."
Peter John Kreeft, Ph.D (quotation taken from The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel)