Have you struggled with making
sense of suffering--whether in your
own life, in the history of God's
people, or just in the world around
you? What if you could come to
see it as pain that is intended to
be productive of new life? That is
precisely what the writer argues in
this study of the biblical perspective
on suffering. The pains of childbirth
are a pervasive and undeniably
significant motif in the Scriptures, beginning in the Garden of Eden with
their imposition on Eve for her role in the Fall and continuing to John the
Divine's heavenly vision of the woman, robed with the sun, ... in labor and] crying
aloud. Here, the author discerns in these birth pains the key to a profound
understanding of the place of suffering in God's redemptive plan not only
for humanity but for the cosmos, and especially in the life of the Church
and the individual Christian.
