Bubble Wrap Children: How Shielding Kids from Suffering Works against Them
Here are five key lessons kids learn through going through hard times with the sensitive guidance of their parents.
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Suffering
In the process of living and dying in a sin-cursed world we experience distress, agony, and misery due to pain, disease, loss, and damage. We call it suffering. Everyone experiences it sooner or later. It is part of the human condition. Some of it we bring on ourselves. Some of us suffer through no fault of our own.
Besides being difficult physically, emotionally, and spiritually, the fact that suffering often appears to have no rhyme or reason, and appears meaningless adds a measure of psychological suffering. Suffering is easier to endure if we can attach some meaning or purpose to it.
While we can't often control the sources of our suffering, we can control our response to it. God gives us direction as to how to respond so as to make it meaningful. We hope these resources help you turn suffering into a situation to praise God for His strength amid your weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9b).
How Can I Turn Suffering into Something Positive?
Often we can’t control difficult circumstances but there are ways to change our perspective and responses, which can help transform suffering into something positive. Here are some perspectives to help transform suffering.
Beat the Blues
Day after day of darkness leads to the winter blues, where everything feels “blah” and seems like it will last forever. However, I’m learning there are ways to combat the blues.
Do I Have to be Thankful for the Trials in my Life?
The Bible says, “give thanks in all circumstances…” (1 Thessalonians 5:18 NIV). But being thankful for trials doesn’t seem right and we wonder if that is what God really wants of us.
Discovering Joy in Life's Tests
True to James 1:2-4, my troubles tested my faith. They brought hardship and hidden tears, but, also true to Scripture, they became opportunities for great joy. Here are several insights I gleaned through my experience.
Five Steps to Crazy Joy
Those whose lives are marked by illogical, outrageous joy seem to display five characteristics that form an acronym for GRACE.
The Last Road Trip
Late on a Tuesday in August the text message came. “Mom had an aneurism. She's in a coma. Not expected to live 24 hours.” We were on a remote island and even a float plane wouldn't get us back in time.
Help Me Understand: Crisis Management
Crises are deemed to be negative changes in life especially when they occur abruptly. Since a crisis is a testing time or an emergency event, we may panic, become stressed, or struggle to cope as a result.
Getting Messy
I had never given the idea of compassion much thought until a few months ago when in the midst of a friend’s crisis, I felt gut wrenching pain and realized, for the first time, this was what true compassion felt like.
Sharing the Father's Heart
For the rest of the missions trip, I thought about Jesus' ministry and the compassion He must have felt for the many people He encountered. People He taught, healed, and those who desperately cried out to Him.
