“Among other things pastoral work is a decision to deal, on the most personal and intimate terms, with suffering. It does not try to find ways to minimize suffering or ways to avoid it. It is not particularly interested in finding explanations for it. It is not a search after the cure for suffering. Pastoral work engages suffering. It is a conscious, deliberate plunge into the experience of suffering.”
(Eugene Peterson, in Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, 93)
