Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60112. Those who suffer are usually surrounded, at least at first, by people who want to help and have no idea how. I have watched kind Christians make a bereavement worse with a sentence, and I have said things at gravesides in my twenties that I would give a good deal to take back….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60111. Chronic illness is a different kind of suffering from the sudden crisis, and the church is often better at the crisis. When somebody collapses there are meals, visits and prayer chains. When somebody has been unwell for eleven years, the casseroles stopped a decade ago and the phone rings less than it used…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60110. Prayers for healing are among the most heartfelt any of us ever pray, and one of the hardest things in pastoral ministry is standing beside someone whose prayer has not been answered. I have done it many times, and I have never got used to it. So this article on prayers for healing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60105. Natural disasters are the version of the problem of evil that is hardest to answer, and I want to say at the outset that I know it. Human wickedness can be laid at the door of human freedom. An earthquake cannot. Nobody chose the fault line under Port-au-Prince or the wave that came…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10167. Can those in heaven see what is happening down here? It is one of the most frequently asked questions in any pastoral ministry, and it is almost never asked out of curiosity. It is asked by a widow, or by parents at a graveside, and behind it lies a longing to know whether…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10128. How there can be joy in heaven while someone we loved is not there is, to my mind, the hardest question in the whole field of last things, and I have never once been asked it as an abstract puzzle. It comes from people with a name and a face in mind. So…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10086. What happens to children at the rapture is one of the questions I am asked most often by parents, and it is almost never asked out of curiosity. It is asked with a catch in the voice, usually late in a conversation, by a mother or father who has just realised what the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01150. Personal experience is one of the trickiest pastoral challenges I deal with, because the person raising it against me is very rarely being dishonest. They have genuinely felt something, whether healing, direction, liberation, or spiritual encounter, and when I gently point out that Scripture seems to say something different, I can watch the…