I highly recommend this article: Three Gifts for Hard Times: What I’ve learned as life has taken a turn for what most people think is the worst by William J. Stuntz

via Three Gifts for Hard Times | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.

Excerpt:

The Shawshank Redemption is about a prisoner convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. That prisoner escapes by crawling through a sewer line until he’s outside the prison’s walls. The narrator describes the transaction this way: “He crawled through a river of [dung] and came out clean on the other side.” God the Son did that, and he did it for the likes of me—so that I, too, and many more like me, might come out clean on the other side. That truth doesn’t just change my life after I die. It changes my life here, now.