The subject of pain and suffering is a popular one for a very simple reason—humans experience a lot of it. At this very moment, vast numbers of people around the globe are enduring physical and emotional trauma like heartache, illness, death. Ours is a life of suffering. We enter the world crying. We walk through it with our shoulders bent into the fiery blast and icy blizzard of affliction. And we leave it in death.

As one writer put it: “Man is born for trouble, / As sparks fly upward.” Who offered this insight? A philosopher in an ivory tower or a monk in cloistered monastery? No. These words dripped with pain from the pen of a flesh and blood sufferer. These words came from the pen of Job.