Where Is God When It Hurts? by Philip Yancey
Week 4: Chapter 3 — Agony and Ecstasy
Read Chapter 3 of Where Is God When It Hurts? Key Scripture: 2 Corinthians 12:7–10; Psalm 22
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Yancey explores the strange relationship between pain and meaning, and asks whether suffering might sometimes open doors that comfort keeps closed.
Discussion Questions
7 questions1.Yancey examines how artists, writers, and mystics have often found their deepest creativity and spiritual insight in seasons of suffering. Does this resonate with your experience, or does it feel like making virtue of necessity?
2.Yancey raises the uncomfortable observation that periods of ease and comfort can sometimes dull our spiritual sensitivity, while pain can sharpen it. Do you find this to be true in your own life? If so, what does that suggest about how we should pray for ourselves?
3.Yancey draws a distinction between pain that destroys and pain that refines. What factors determine which direction a person's suffering tends to move them — toward bitterness or toward depth?
a.Can you think of a person you know whose suffering seems to have made them more compassionate, more faith-filled, or more fully human? What did you observe in them?
b.Can you think of an opposite example — where pain drove someone deeper into isolation or bitterness? What was different?
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