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?
Scripture: Psalm 13
Speaker: Ben Beasley, BenB@cckc.church

“My soul bleeds and the blood steadily, silently, disturbingly slowly, swallows me whole.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, (Complete Letters)

That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs within my story. I struggle indeed to go beyond merely owning my grief toward owning it redemptively. But I will not and cannot disown it. I shall remember Eric. Lament is part of life…A friend told me that he had given copies of Lament to all of his children. "Why did you do that?" I asked. "Because it is a love-song, " he said. That took me aback. But Yes, it is a love-song. Every lament is a love-song. Will love-songs one day no longer be laments? - Nicholas Wolterstorff

Pt. 1: How long, Lord?

Why?

“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)

Pt. 2: Consider me

How?
1) Turn to God
2) Bring your suffering to God
3) Demand of God
4) Trust in God

“Throughout this process, I have clung to a quote by C.S. Lewis, where he says, my argument against God was that the universe seems so cruel and unjust. But how did I get this idea of just, unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he first has some idea of straight. What was I comparing the universe to when I called it unjust?” Rachael Denhollander, (What Is a Girl Worth?: My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics)

Pt. 3: But I have trusted

Who?

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)