What Can Be Learned From Unrequited Love?

What Can Be Learned from Unrequited Love?

Research Paper Submitted to Dr. Steve Tracy Phoenix Seminary Phoenix, Arizona

In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for TH 510 Biblical Sexuality

By Justin G. W. Bellars March 24, 2008

What Can Be Learned from Unrequited Love? By Justin Bellars

Abstract Unrequited love is an abrasive experience. It can leave some of us incredulous, others bitter and distraught. Though superficially it may seem to amount to little more than an exercise in futility or a horrendous waste of time and effort, there yet remains the possibility of spiritual refinement through such an undesirable experience as unrequited love. Unrequited love could, perhaps, best be viewed as a means by which the Lord redirects our attention on our need to find life solely in Him. When we think the fullness of our life depends on someone or something other than Christ, we are selling ourselves short on life as God intended. John 5:40 is a commentary on mankind’s refusal to come to Jesus for life. We need life, and He offers us life, though it seems, far too often, rather than seeking His living water, we go to other places, or as the prophet Jeremiah might say, to broken cisterns.[1] We chase counterfeit forms of life, rather than the One who offers real life. This is perhaps one of the saving graces of unrequited love. Many of us lose sight of our propensity to seek out life in relationships with imagebearers, rather than with the Creator Himself.

Unrequited Love Allowing our hearts to be vulnerable to another person is a risky proposition. There is no guarantee of “success” in love, as it is part of an exploratory process. Gary Thomas recounts having read the Song of Songs with great discomfort as a young man because, he “… was terrified of ever wanting someone as desperately as those two lovers wanted each other. Such wanting, [he] knew, even at a young age, can lead to tremendous pain, disillusionment, and grief.”[ 2] Uncertainty makes relational pain a very real possibility. Even if “success” results, however we may define that, very seldom does it seem to correspond directly to what we may have once envisioned. The way we respond to the realization that our romantic aspirations will never be reciprocated by a particular individual can speak volumes about our character and what we truly believe about God, ourselves, and others. Unrequited love, in its simplest form, is viewed by most to be a failed attempt at pursuing a romantic relationship with another individual. For some, our hunger for the approval of others can drive us to pursue someone who displays even the most negligible amount of interest in us. If it is a mutual friendship, that seemed to be heading in a romantic direction, which results in unrequited love, it can feel much like a breakup, especially if the risk of pursuit has cost the friendship. When what we imagine to exist in a relationship does not correspond to the other person’s reality, that dysfunctional disconnect often seems to manifest itself in our realization of unrequited love. For many, unrequited love amounts to losing a sense of significance thought to have been gained from another person’s involvement in their life. The issue then becomes seeking significance and identity in someone other than God, which is

idolatrous. Unrequited love can involve various dynamics that appear to complicate specific incidences; however, we will discuss those aspects later.

Jesus’ Ability to Identify with Our Struggle Ultimately, Jesus can identify with unrequited love. For as many as have chosen to reciprocate His love towards them, there seem to be far more who have chosen not to reciprocate His love. He endured the rejection of mankind (1Pe 2:4, Jn 1:10-11), however, He remained compassionate and forgiving, rather than responding in anger and wrath. There was no sense of entitlement by Christ, and if He is our model for living a life of faith, we should respond with an attitude devoid of entitlement and resentment as well. We should ultimately identify with Christ’s sufferings over those who will never reciprocate His love for them. We should gain a clearer perspective on what it means to pour ourselves out for someone who will never appreciate us. However, as followers of Christ, we can never just leave it there. We need to keep in mind that despite the loss we feel through unrequited love, He is the only consistent One who initiates love toward us, and when we respond to His love, He reciprocates in ways no other truly can. Ultimately, Christ’s love for us surpasses any love we could receive from another human. People in our lives fail and disappoint us. Only Christ never fails nor disappoints. Only Christ responds perfectly to us as whom He has created us to be. Only He can adequately love us as we truly need to be loved. There is no lack of completeness in Him. No other can compete with Him in this arena.

Striving after Tangible Affection Our dilemma appears to be the notion that we may strive after things that seem more tangible or readily available than God. We opt for the touch of another human over a promise of ever-present companionship in the form of the Holy Spirit. We desire an embrace over the promise of a future hope that will not be realized this side of heaven. This takes us to another aspect of why these encounters with unrequited love may be a necessity in the refining process of sanctification. When we have committed to devoting our lives to our Creator, we cannot expect Him to settle for a secondary position in our lives. The Christian life demands the centrality of Christ. Unrequited love may be a self-correcting manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s work in our life, guiding us to examine problem areas in our spiritual walks.

An Opportunity for Spiritual Growth Unrequited love can be an opportunity for the love of Christ to further impact our lives. Despite any relational pain we may endure, we are being loosed from a onesided commitment. Once a relationship has taken a step in the direction of unrequited love, we must be attentive to what Christ is doing in our lives. For those of us affected by such matters, we need to choose to accept what has happened, even if we will never understand it. If Job was not granted explanations for his afflictions in his life, how much less may we expect them? Demands are not ours to make. We cannot expect we are entitled to some form of reciprocal appreciation in any relationship. If we have given our heart to a one-sided relationship, we need to walk away, not just for the sake of our sanity, but for the sake of our relationship with Christ and for the sake of

sensitivity to His image bearer who we have claimed to love. Continuing to pursue a false hope or false reality will subject us to continuing torment. We must be wary of letting bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and slander consume us, lest we grieve the Holy Spirit with ungodly responses to relational rejection.[ 3] We are not guaranteed a positive resolution to any ostensible sacrifices we choose to make in pursuing someone. If our love for someone is not consistent with the attributes presented by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, we need to re-evaluate our conception of love. We are availed an opportunity to emulate Christ in being kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving of our brothers and sisters,[ 4] despite their chosen behaviors toward us. Neither the existence, nor the end of any earthly relationship factors into our true identity.

Our Doubts For those of us who find ourselves dealing with unrequited love, life is anything but romantic. Though, if nothing else, this is an attestation to the fact that God has imbued us with needs that only He can meet.[ 5] Many of us have devoted our lives to pursuing romantic notions of what this life is supposed to be about and what we want to believe that God is calling us into. We are told in Genesis, that it was not good for man to be alone,[6] hence the creation of Eve. Furthermore, we are counseled that a cord of three strands is not easily broken[7] and how much better life is when there is someone there for you to help you in life.[8] Even Jesus sends the disciples out in pairs,[9] making it seem prudent that we do not engage in life alone. This fuels many of our pursuits for a mate, someone with whom to engage in life. We can often take this as an assertion of

entitlement to a mate, but what is this really telling us? Some people say this is merely an indication that we are created to be in community. Community may sound like a plausible explanation to the uninitiated, but for those languishing in their perceived loneliness, this is no form of exhortation. For those who may be surrounded by a church family of brothers and sisters, and yet still feel completely alone, this begins to seem like little more than a shallow platitude. For the individual holding a friend’s newborn and being elated for them and later that same day weeping uncontrollably because they are convinced they will never have a family of their own, this is little encouragement. The struggle for the lonely is that unrequited love seems to legitimize the attacks they suffer most from the enemy of their soul. For many, unrequited love ostensibly validates feelings of depression, shame, worthlessness, and inferiority. “Sometimes it is difficult to believe in God’s love when we are being denied what we want most.”[10] We lose sight of the fact that each of us needs God more than a man needs a woman or a woman needs a man.[11] Many of us want to believe that God has high aspirations for our lives, but our lives do not appear to tell us the same story. We lament being less than we wish we were. We lament ostensibly not possessing whatever is required to elicit the interest of the person we think would best suit us. And no matter how real the emotions attached to our disappointments in this life, we often fail to look at Christ and the life He lived to show us what we ought to expect our lives to be like, if we truly follow Him and conform to the precedent He set with His life.[ 12] It is not a romantic life. It is a hard life, built on an unshakeable trust in the Father[ 13] and full obedience to His revealed word.[14] That is a life where any notion of entitlement has been tossed out of the equation. If we

are to live authentically as God intended, we need to be trusting and obedient just as Christ has demonstrated. We need to look no further than Him.[15] Despite our demands for material proof, such as that which Thomas required in order to believe the resurrection of Christ, we need to understand how Jesus’ words to Thomas in John 20:29 apply to our own situation. We will be blessed if we trust in Christ’s ability to come through for us, regardless of our ability to personally realize the instances in which He manifests Himself on this side of eternity.

Sanctification Leading to Restoration The point of Christianity is not severity, but rather to restore us as human beings.[16] If we truly trust God on this point, we recognize that it is not God’s desire for us to endure severity in this life without reason, anymore than it was His goal to gratuitously inflict severity on His own Son, but rather its purpose is for the restoration which is accomplished through the endurance of affliction.[ 17] There was a sanctifying element in the life of Christ that is just as present, though to a lesser degree, in our lives. We either model our dependence on the Father as He did, or we model disobedience. Gary Thomas asserts that the purpose of marriage is a sanctifying process, not a means to satisfaction.[18] I contend that such a principle extends to all relationships. We grow most through the adversities of life, including relationships which do not develop as we wish they would. We can respond to unrequited love in acknowledgement that God is using it to make us more like His Son, rather than becoming embittered as the world, our flesh, and the enemy would prefer. There is a choice as to how we respond to opportunities for obedience. Allender and Longman,

though, speaking of marital relationships, note that a relationship moves either toward enhancing another’s glory or toward degrading one another.[19] The same opportunity exists in responding to a broken relationship. We set ourselves up for relational failure, if we respond inappropriately, or if we expect things to be smooth.[20] It would seem there are few easy lessons in this life. Eugene Peterson’s adaptation of Romans 8:29-30 in The Message gives us an interesting view of what conformity to Christ’s character looks like:

God knew what He was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love Him along the same lines as the life of His Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity He restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in Him. After God made that decision of what His children should be like, He followed it up by calling people by name. After He called people by name, He set them on a solid basis with Himself. And then, after getting them established, He stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what He had begun.[21]

Oswald Chambers wrote, “If our hopes are being disappointed just now, it means that they are being purified.”[ 22] Unrequited love is one of many aspects of the sanctifying process for those who endure it.

Desperation of Compromise Another aspect of nonreciprocal relationships that may be helpful in identifying dysfunction is the type of compromises we are willing to make. It is often helpful to recognize that we do not need to settle for the breadcrumbs or table scraps of a

relationship that someone we love disproportionately is willing to offer us. This mentality enables further dysfunctional dynamics in the relationship and may ultimately produce far more frustration and unhealthy relational patterns. We were made for mutual relationships, not ones in which we yield control solely to the hands of another human. One of the unfortunate outcomes of unrequited love is the notion that “taking whatever a person can get” is acceptable. Such an act of compromise kills the heart when what we truly desired was so much more. Compromise may prove to be a sign of desperation, rather than a demonstration of maturity and contentment. Such a situation may further commit our hearts to a relationship of false intimacy, false hope, and an extended fiction. When we allow another person to delineate boundaries in a relationship we freely pursued, the relationship can degenerate into a dictatorial “friendship”. That is no way to experience community. It seems a pale imitation of life as God intended it to be. In such a scenario, we have given a person too much control in our life. We must be alert that we can choose the relationships to which we give over our hearts and the things to which we do not. We can choose what we will let into our heart, and notions of love do not have to be viewed as an uncontrollable inevitability, to which we must succumb, as a “victim”.

Signposts to Christ In researching this topic, I encountered the notion that unrequited love can sometimes lead to a type of spiritual experience that is unattainable in mutual love. Laura Smit states that, “In some cases, unrequited love may point us to God even more truly than mutual love. In mutual love, we may be distracted from God and lost in the

experience of loving. Unrequited love includes pain and restlessness that prompt us to look beyond the person we love toward whom that love points.”[23] Our society, our friends, and our churches are eager to get us to “move on” or “get over” the person by whom we have experienced the pain of unrequited love. However, one aspect of unrequited love, unaddressed by both this advice and secular observation, is the notion that what draws the pursuer to the pursued is the pursued individual’s reflection of God. Some of us are attracted to the Christ-likeness of certain individuals. I found a reference in Smit’s book that mentions how Charles Williams, who ventured to explore the theological aspects of romance, conjectured that often, what attracts one individual to another is that person’s God-given potential that will ultimately not be revealed this side of heaven.[ 24] The argument is made that seeing another person’s beauty requires seeing what is there, as well as imagining what is not there, but what the person may be as God intends them to be in perfection.[25] Obviously, the distortion in romantic pursuit occurs when we imagine someone to be something that they really are not. When a romantic interest in another is little more than infatuation based on self-centeredness and viewing another person as a potential possession, rather than an independent imagebearer of Christ, the situation becomes idolatrous. Any relationship in which someone or something is sought for its/his/her ability to gratify the pursuer, there are distinct patterns of idolatry present. The challenge for us is to distinguish whether the emotions we construe as love for another are selfish (i.e. “consuming”) in nature or selfless (i.e. “bestowing”). Do we love for self-gratifying purposes, or is our admiration

genuine appreciation for what God is wreaking in another human being? This is a question we must ask ourselves in complete honesty.

The Will One issue, in particular, that I did not find directly addressed, is that when a person is rejected by someone in whom they sense this notion of godliness, they can feel like the rejection is from God Himself. This is compounded if our understanding of the relationship was influence by well-intended “congregational prophecy” gone awry. Some of us are easily swayed by “prophetic” utterances to the effect that pursuing a particular individual is the will of God and would be beneficial in following His calling on our lives, especially if there is already a latent attraction. In attempting to encourage us to overcome our fears and act in faith, we can sometimes be willingly misdirected by anyone appearing to share spiritual insight regarding any romantic aspirations of our own. Whether intentional or not, this can result in spiritual abuse. People looking for “signs” can be predisposed to “spiritualizing” their relationships. When “spiritual” manipulation is combined with unrequited love, the results can be far more devastating than in typical unrequited love scenarios. Dynamics of spiritual abuse factor into the psychology of the enamored individual. This further exacerbates the feelings of hopelessness, distrust, disbelief, or anger that may result in the culmination or realization of unrequited love. Smit notes that attributing another person’s rejection of us to God’s will fails to recognize the genuine agency of the other person.[26] In the same way, prayers that someone will come to love us are essentially asking God to override someone else’s free

will to gratify ourselves and serve our needs. We fail to recognize that people are not handed to us as prizes for our faith, although a distorted theology could certainly bring an individual to entertain the thought. Seldom do we acknowledge the free will of all participants in relationships. This can also be attributable to bad theology. Regardless, people have preferences and ideals as to what they are looking for in relationships and that is part of who they are. That is part of what we claim to love, and it is our choice to love them for who they really are, rather than whomever we may imagine them to be. Popular fiction, books, movies, television, and other assorted fairytales, would have us believe that perseverance overcomes all challenges of unrequited love. Unfortunately, some of us have discovered that, “life never turns out the way you think it will about 90 percent of the time.”[27] After receiving fictitious spiritual assurances from well-meaning people, only to find that those assurances are far from reality, it can easily seem like there is no bright future available, ever. False expectations foster an attitude of entitlement. With the realization of false hope, our hearts sink. If any aspect of the pursuit has been “spiritually” manipulated, we can feel despair, betrayal, and even abandonment by God. In moments of unfulfilled “congregational prophecy”, or spiritualized manipulation, or whatever we may call it, when we lose sight of recognizing and respecting another person’s will, we may begin to question our faith. We may believe we failed to pray enough or believe enough. Our contempt is searching for a home. Two common destinations are ourselves, because we believe we failed and it is our fault, we believe we could have done more, been more, or invested more of ourselves; or secondly, we direct our contempt toward God, because we believe He is holding out on us, that He could have come through, and He could have changed the

other person’s heart, but He did not.[28] In turn, this causes us to question His goodness and His righteousness. Of course, in cases of idolatry, the other person receives the brunt of the pursuer’s contempt.

The Goodness of God “It is a heroic courage to trust in the love of God regardless of the outcome,”[29] including in unrequited love. “If we believe that God is love, we need to trust that even at those times when we want to cry with rage and frustration because something precious to us seems to have been taken away, God is treating us with love. Even at those times when we feel as though God is punishing us or depriving us of something or treating us unfairly in some way, we must have faith in God’s constant love for us, just as children learn to trust their parents.”[30] When we are disciplined appropriately by our earthly parents, we later are able to respond in gratitude. We are assured in Scripture that every good gift we receive comes from above.[31] “We must confess that everything God gives us is good. If God is the cause behind our breakups, if God is the reason we are single, then breakups are good, and singleness is good. This must be the context of all discussion about this.”[32] When we do not realize our hopes, we scramble to uncover the rationale behind our circumstances. We feel unresolved until we either fabricate or uncover an explanation for them. Seldom do we instinctively rest assured in the goodness of God. Delighting ourselves in the Lord, such that He will give us the desires of our hearts,[ 33] has to be understood in light of the fact that the Lord does not give us things which we will ultimately consume with our flesh.[34] We need to humble ourselves in the

sight of the Lord, and this is only possible by gaining an accurate perspective of who He is and who we are. We need to be able to wrestle with the tension that we are imagebearers of Christ marred by sin, yet adopted and loved. Focusing on one aspect or the other is insufficient. The Psalmist declares that he is a worm of a man, a reproach who is despised,[ 35] yet that perspective alone is insufficient, because there is so much more to our identity, and the rest of Scripture offsets such extremes. Even without knowing God, man is still created in His image, and that makes man far more valuable than a worm. When we trust in Jesus, however, we are displaced from being summarily identified by our sin to being identified by the righteousness of Christ, which seems to transform us from material used for ignoble purposes to that which is used for noble purposes.[36] We are loved by God and we are considered lovely to Him. Ultimately what we mean to Him matters far more than what we mean to someone else.

Love Cannot Be Forced As Laura Smit asserts, “No matter what painful romantic rejection you may experience, you can be confident that God will never reject your love for Him.”[37] If God does not dictate or override the will of another based on our desires, neither will He dictate or override our own will to love Him. I get the distinct impression that there is much to learn about the character of God from unrequited love. It seems when we pursue another person, we may really be seeking a taste of God in the present which we cannot truly experience in all its fullness this side of heaven, and we are beside ourselves when we are denied even that taste. I would venture to suggest that perhaps that is a shadow of how God feels when someone He created to spend eternity with Him

in paradise turns their back on Him. We can speculate that is why things do not always work out the way we wish they did. He may be allowing us to identify with how His heart breaks when one of us turns away from Him. If He gives us the choice to love Him or not, it would seem that He does not get everything He desires, 38 and He feels pain, so why should we not feel pain as well? He neither forces nor demands His will, so neither should we.

Looking for Hope When we question God’s intentions toward us, we need eyes to see what is really happening. We demand the tangible in the here and now, rather than trusting in the promise of perfection in God Himself. Part of this may be a result of being burned by presuming to understand God’s will and acting out our romantic pursuits based on a completely wrong understanding of what is really going on. Sometimes, it is other people presuming to offer us encouragement in alleged words from the Lord, but ultimately realized as disappointment in unsubstantiated expectations. Regardless of the cause, such pursuits can make us callous and affect our sensitivity to genuinely trusting in the legitimate promises of Scripture made in God’s Name. Saint Irenaeus is quoted as having said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”[39] Yet it is a challenge to exhibit the fullness of life when hopes and dreams, regardless of their legitimacy are revealed to be nothing more than false hope. In John 10:10, Jesus instructs, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” The overriding principle, that we are missing, is that the life needs to come from God alone, not a broken cistern, not a

fallen person, not a well-meaning believer. We need to be attuned to the Christocentricity of the Gospel to which we commit ourselves. If someone or something other than Christ has been incorporated into our big dream for this life, we are headed for disappointment. We can only legitimately include ourselves and God in our dreams. We have no control over whether anyone else will remain in our lives or not. Sometimes we will be forced to let go of them, for the sake of our own sanity, lest they should interfere with or even sort of 'dictate' what we do or do not do. Sometimes people are taken, or take themselves out of our lives. Including anyone other than God in our dreams or aspirations enables those dreams or aspirations to be controlled by someone who does not have our best interests at heart. Despite the pain of unrequited love, this is a far easier lesson to learn when the relationship does not materialize. Although we would like to attribute our desires to God, if He is not the center of all we are and do, our life is out of balance. It is true that we do have legitimate desires that God has given us, nothing for which we should feel implicit shame. None of us wants to walk alone, and God acknowledges this desire in Genesis. But the desires we have cannot override our purpose for being here. If the inclusion of a person in our lives validates us, by their exclusion (voluntary or otherwise) we empower them to invalidate us.[40] Jesus Christ is the only person who does not let us down or leave us. He should be the center of our life, and our “big dream” for this life, anyone else who steps into our dream is icing, but not essential. Jesus needs to be our focus. We can only find validation in Him. He loves us as no other person can. He loves those people we think we love as we never could. Though desires that result in unrequited love may feel like weakness, we must keep in mind that no

struggle has befallen us that is not common to man,[41] and His grace is sufficient for us, knowing that His power is perfected in our weakness.[42] If there is a reason for everything that happens, it cannot just be to frustrate us or leave us doubting ourselves. There is no hope in that, and God is not one to leave us without hope. We must trust He is teaching us something. Just as physical pain is a blessing in disguise, indicating when something is not right inside us and forcing us to concentrate on the problem area,[43] so too is the emotional pain of unrequited love.

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Jeremiah 2:13 Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 211. 3 Ephesians 4:30-31 4 Ephesians 4:32 5 Robert S. McGee, The Search for Significance (Nashville: W Publishing Group, A Division of Thomas Nelson, 2000), 41. 6 Genesis 2:18 7 Ecclesiastes 4:12 8 Ecclesiastes 4:9 9 Mark 6:7, Luke 10:1 10 Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 29 11 John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 189. 12 Luke 9:23 13 Matthew 12:50 14 Proverbs 3:5-6 15 John 6:68 16 John Eldredge, “The Utter Relief of Holiness,” 4 CD Presentation, Ransomed Heart Ministries, 2007. 17 James 1:2-4 18 Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 13. 19 Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman, Intimate Allies (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995), 11. 20 Rob Eagar, The Power of Passion (Suwanee: Grace Press, 2002), 243. 21 Eugene H. Peterson, The Message Remix: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 2003), 1327. 22 Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing, 1935), 53. 23 Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 243. 24 Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 176 25 Ibid. 26 Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 236. 27 John Eldredge, Waking the Dead. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2003), 6 28 John Eldredge, Waking the Dead. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2003), 7 29 Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust, 4. 2

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Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 27 31 James 1:17 32 Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 27 33 Psalm 37:4 34 James 4:3 35 Psalm 22:6 36 2 Timothy 2:20-21 37 Laura A. Smit, Loves Me, Loves Me Not: The Ethics of Unrequited Love. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 28 38 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9; Matthew 23:37 39 Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, A. Cleveland Coxe, The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol.I : Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, (Oak Harbor : Logos Research Systems, 1997), S. 489 40 John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 94 41 1 Corinthians 10:13 42 2 Corinthians 12:9 43 Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 26