This is the ultimate role of suffering: to facilitate our return to our heavenly Father, Who loves us more than we love ourselves and in Whose presence we will find joy and fulfillment (10)

Joy is not in opposition to suffering it is the outcome of successfully meeting its challenges and completing its tasks (9)

Understood properly, suffering gives us hope for the Beatific vision and the motivation to attain it. (270)

Suffering has a way of turning a person inward, toward where God resides (xvii)

At its deepest level, suffering is a call to conversion by God (18).

1. The ultimate message of the theology of suffering is one that provides the perspective that God loves us as only the Creator of the Universe could (270)

Suffering needs to be persistent and uncomfortable to warn us of the threat from evil and motivate us to take action to eliminate it (11)

Suffering is not something to overcome, it is something to be heeded (19)

Suffering is our innate ability to sense the presence of evil; or, more accurately, the absence of good that is significant enough to threaten our existence physically, socially, psychologically, or spiritually (13)