02/17/2026 – Chapter 27 – “The Roller Coaster” / “Only one life. Twill soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.” quote from Peter Kreeft’s grandmother, done with roller coaster rides forever…
Thanks for sharing this one Lenny!
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“Every morning I offer God “all my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of the day”. There will be many of all four. Our prayers and works are our gifts in God, and our joys and sufferings are His gifts to us.
Sufferings, too are gifts because God designed life in this world of matter, time, and space to be a roller coaster of joys and sufferings. It is not Heaven. Here, not only is every down followed by an up, but every up is also eventually followed by a down.
And when it is, we are surprised. And that is the most surprising thing of all: that we question this universal and natural structure of our lives. We do not take suffering and sorrow for granted; we are surprised and outraged by them. We “do not go gentle into that good night”. We “rage, rage against the dying of the light”. Why? We are not usually surprised by pleasure and happiness. We take them for granted. Why? Why do we have a restless heart and a lover’s quarrel with the world? (The answer, of course, is because we are not made for this world but for God. This world is only our womb, or our playpen.)
We ask, If God loves us so much, why didn’t He give us constant joy in the world? The answer is that He did, and we fell from that Paradise. Now we cannot appreciate joys without the contrast. In Heaven, our redeemed nature will not need the contrast anymore. But we cannot now imagine that heavenly condition; it is so far from our present experience, inconceivable by “the heart of man” (1 Corinthians 2:9). We can only believe in it and hope for it. We don’t really know what we deeply want, only what we don’t want.
If God didn’t give us sufferings, we would stagnate. Sufferings lie at the bottom of a wave, the trough: that’s where the power and the energy are. The top of the wave, the crest, is where the ease and delight are.
So the next time God gives you joy, thank Him, but also we wise enough to know that it will not last, that sorrow and suffering are ahead. All roads turn. Tragedy will surprise you tomorrow as joy surprised you today. And if God gives you suffering, know that this, too, will not last and that joy and deliverance will come tomorrow. Every day ends in nightfall, and every night ends in morning. Neither night nor day lasts in the world; what last are two things: the roller coaster and God’s loving will, which is the source of both the ups and the downs in this life –which will be soon past! (My grandmother had a hauntingly effective sign on her wall, in needlepoint, that said, “Only one life. Twill soon past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.”)
The darkness, the nights, the sufferings, the downs, the evils of all kinds do not come from God’s “dark side” because He has no dark side. “God is light and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). They come from the Devil and from our own fallenness. But they are permitted and used by God, who, like a judo master, uses the strength of his opponent against him. God this most definitively on Calvary. If He can take the greatest evil that ever happened, the torture and murder of God Incarnate, and make of it the greatest good that ever happened, the salvation of the world (our Good Friday). He can do the same with every other comparatively little evil in our lives and eventually with the roller coaster itself, which, after death, He will turn into a rocket.”
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Soli Deo Gloria!