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Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic work, The Brothers Karamazov, probes the depths of human suffering. In that story, the hopeful believer Ivan articulates the Christian vision of suffering like this:

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for … that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”[i]

Or, as Samwise Gamgee put it in The Return of the King, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?”[1] This is the hope for the suffering saint. You can have hope when you hurt because your suffering has an expiration date. Hold on, weary Christian. The day is coming when everything sad will come untrue.

 

[i] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 247–48.

[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Del Rey Books, 1994), 246.