Light at the End of Our Troubles?

Before you finish reading this sentence, someone will be dead of starvation who was alive when you started it. This very minute thirty people will die of starvation. that's one death every two seconds - not from all causes, but one alone: food deprivation!

The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed,one-third is under-fed, and other third is starving. Seventy percent of the world's chidren under the age of six are undernourished; due to lack of food, 200 million of them are affected by mental retardation or blindness, and another 10 million are hunger-diseased.

This unthinkable suffering, due primarily to poverty, waste, theft, war, greed, and poor distribution techniques, provides an excuse for atheists and agnostics to conclude that human existence in general is one big morass of meaningless suffering and death. That would be true, of course, if there were no after-life.

To counterpoint this nilhilstic mentality, one theologian listed fifty-six biblically stated reasons for suffering as part of God's permissive will. consider just one of those reasons. Take a closer look at your own suffering and ponder Paul's words from 2 Corinthians 4:16-17: "We do not lost heart...Outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day: For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us a eternal glory that far outweighs them all."