one more thought ...

Concerning what appears below on Ezekiel 33:

Suffering is very complicated. It is hard to say any one thing about it, since there is such mystery in the Lord's loving providence. The safest thing for us to do is to let the whole of the Scriptures give us what we need to know passage by passage. The point of Ezekiel 33 is not for us to be able to diagnose the mystery behind someone else's particular suffering, although I suppose that we might be able to help there sometimes. The point is for each of us to hear what God is saying to us as a covenant community, to repent and to live, to remember that God loves us, and that He is involved for our good in our lives, even through horrible suffering. To eliminate the message of Ezekiel 33 from the Bible would be a mistake. It is always right for the church to repent. Cry out to God for your friends who are suffering. It often is a gift from God to suffer, sometimes a very costly gift. It needs to be used well, and it is very hard or impossible to figure it all out in our own lives, let alone in the lives of others.

In Christ's Mercy and Love,
Steve