The Whole Earth Groans - Romans 8:19-22

When God gives up the world to futility, he did not do so vindictively but redemptively.  He allows us to live on our own, in our own futility.  This is severe mercy.

God cannot trust us to the full knowledge of His ways.
-Chuck Jacob

Nicholas Wolterstorff

"If sympathy for the world's wounds is not enlarged by our anguish, 
if love for those around us is not expanded, 
if gratitude for what is good does not flame up, 
if insight is not deepened, 
if commitment to what is important is not strengthened, 
if aching for a new day is not intensified,
if hope is weakened and faith diminished,
if from the experience of death comes nothing good, then death has won. Then death, be proud.
So I shall struggle to live the reality of Christ's rising and death's dying."
-Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son, p. 92-93

David Wells on Prayer

Prayer is rebellion against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal, to accept as normal what is so perversely broken.
-David Wells