Where Is God When It Hurts?

John Donne, seventeenth-century poet, found himself listening to the megaphone of pain. An angry father-in-law got him fired from his job and blackballed from a career in law. Donne turned in desperation to the church, taking orders as an Anglican priest. But the year he took his first parish job, his wife Anne died, leaving him seven children. And a few years later, in 1623, spots appeared on Donne’s body. He was diagnosed with the bubonic plague.

The illness dragged on, sapping his strength almost to the point of death (Donne’s illness turned out to be a form of typhus, not the plague). In the midst of this illness, Donne wrote series of devotions on suffering which rank among the most poignant meditations ever written on the subject. He composed the book in bed, without benefit of notes, convinced he was dying.[1]

[1]Quoted in Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts? 72.