I am part of his story. I am the epiphany of God. I am a character whose life events have a purpose for me and for the story. Every even has a purpose in the author's larger design, even the bark of a dog, the death of a baby bird, or a small black coffin for a stillborn child. He knows the falling of a sparrow and he knew the collapse of a mind. God does not look at our suffering from afar. It is an intimate event to him. He is the author of every detail, speaking the suffering as it occurs.

Anticipating death and calling it gain, Christians are evangelists of the grotesque. The very hope of the Gospel rests directly upon our ability to imagine a world in which suffering serves as the soil from which resurrection springs.