Community Group Conversation Starters
Conversation Starters help us dig deeper, connecting Sunday’s sermons with our Monday lives. Please know that these questions are meant to be a resource. You do not have to follow them verbatim or get through them all. We trust you to know your group and to ask the questions based on your group needs.

1. Read Psalm 13.

2. Why do you think suffering is such a barrier for faith in Jesus?

3. What did you learn from the sermon and Scripture passage about wrestling with the problem of suffering as a Christian?

4. How does the good news of Jesus uniquely meet us in our suffering?

5. How does what you learned affect how you respond to your own suffering or the sufferings of those around you?

Take time to share prayer requests and pray together.

Title: But What About Suffering?
Reference: Psalm 13
Speaker: Taylor Fair, TaylorF@cckc.church

"My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole."- Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

Listen: if everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with their suffering. ...It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child…Not worth it, because her tears remain unredeemed…I want to forgive, and I want to embrace, I don’t want more suffering. And if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price." - Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

Pain is horror. Pain is that which tempts you like Christ on the cross to say, “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?" Pain is negation of everything that seems precious. - Frederick Beuchner, (A Crazy Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory)

I'm right beside you! I feel what you feel!
And I'm here to hold you
When death is too real!
You know, I died, too! I was terrified!I gave myself for you!
I was crucified
Because I love you!
I love you, child!I love you!
- Chad Gardner

“There is such a being, and he can forgive everything, forgive all and for all, because he himself gave his innocent blood for all and for everything. You’ve forgotten about him.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"No matter the circumstances of any story at first telling, one thing that each person shares in common who has done the work that creates lasting change leading ot greater love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control is that he or she has suffered…What sets these people apart is that they have developed a relationship with suffering in which they do not intentionally invite it into their lives but neither do they reject it. …they neither deny it nor become overwhelmed by it. Rather, they learn to be with it and acknowledge that it is with them." - Curt Thompson, (The Deepest Place)