But it was his words of sadness and suffering at the end of his life that magnetized the Christian faith for the ages as one of authentic human experience—a faith that understands the pain in ordinary lives and the human reaction to it. This was not the norm in Paul’s time. His philosophical contemporaries admired and followed the Stoics, who sought to banish emotional expressions of suffering from their communication.5 A wise person, the Stoics taught, is strong and disciplined enough to see that anger and grief are senseless and destructive. Suffering should be borne, well, stoically. In
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