A few years ago, best selling writer Philip Yancey wrote these words: ‘For all its faults and failures, the church offers a place to bring wounds and to seek meaning in times of brokenness and struggle. Visiting them I heard of suicides, birth defects, children hit by trucks, and teenagers raped. One woman, now an ordained minister, spoke of a dark period after her son died when for eighteen months she could not bring herself to pray. She cried out one day, ‘God, I don’t want to die like this, with all communication cut off.’ Even so, it took her six more months before she could pray again.
From such souls, I learn that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Prayer offers no ironclad guarantees, just the certain promise that we need not live that mystery alone.’