{"product_id":"christs-suffering","title":"Christ's Suffering","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eThe poet and professor Christian Wiman’s autobiographical book \u003cem\u003eMy Bright Abyss\u003c\/em\u003e traces his movement from atheism to faith. Although raised in a Christian home and experiencing a conversion as a child, the adult Wiman left the faith, even ashamed of the seeming ignorance of his past belief. It was not until he experienced the love of his wife and a life-altering diagnosis of incurable blood cancer that he began to once again believe. A large part of his reason for belief lies in the excruciating pain that he experiences from his illness. Wiman writes quite a bit about how his faith comes largely from realizing that Christ himself experienced intense and unimaginable human suffering. His envisioning of Christ’s suffering enabled him to realize that his suffering was not as isolating as it always felt: “I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ's passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion. I'm not suggesting that ministering angels are going to come down and comfort you as you die. I'm suggesting that Christ's suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering, that Christ's compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible” (Christian Wiman, \u003cem\u003eMy Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer\u003c\/em\u003e [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), 155).\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ministry Pass","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67968348356924,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0852\/9874\/1564\/files\/hush-naidoo-jade-photography-yo01Z-9HQAw-unsplash.jpg?v=1793323579","url":"https:\/\/app.ministrypass.com\/products\/christs-suffering","provider":"Ministry Pass","version":"1.0","type":"link"}