Like a Woman in Travail

Have you struggled with making sense of suffering--whether in your own life, in the history of God's people, or just in the world around you? -What if the "e;secret"e; to the enigma of suffering, far from being shrouded in impenetrable darkness, is transparently set forth at the very beginning of the Bible, in God's immediate response to human sin, from where it is progressively unfolded as the inner dynamic of so-called "e;salvation history"e;?-What if suffering, in its essence, is a form of precisely those birth pangs through which a new creation, enucleated in the body of the risen Christ, is being brought into existence to replace the old? -What if you could come to see your own suffering as pain that is intended to be productive of new life? This is precisely what John A. Porter argues in this study of the biblical perspective on suffering. He discerns in birth pangs the key to a profound understanding of the place of suffering in God's redemptive plan, not only for humanity but for the cosmos, and especially in the life of the Church and the individual Christian.