“All the songs of lament, the entire book of Lamentations, and many other Scripture passages reveal the importance of realism and sorrow in the Christian life. No treatment of joy and happiness should deny or minimize such texts. Indeed, a truly biblical worldview and an authentic doctrine of joy and happiness fully recognize and embrace the realities of suffering in this present age. Happiness in Scripture is all the deeper and richer because it doesn’t require denial or pretense, and can be experienced in the midst of severe difficulty.” (Randy Alcorn, Happiness, page 178)“Modern men, in the absence of absolutes, have polluted all aspects of morality, making standards completely hedonistic and relativistic…We can remember Vincent van Gogh, who tried to fulfill his idealism by starting a community in southern France. He was desperately in search of something beautiful. Yet as we study his self-portraits, we see them disintegrate year after year, until at the end of his life, they are less than human. We must cry for our present world, because the idealists who have screamed so loudly against the falseness and hypocrisy of the plastic culture have ended up in an even worse position -- the inhumanity and destruction of everything they hoped to accomplish.” (Francis Schaeffer, No Little People, pages 55-56)
