The Great Dane Gives Birth

Soren Kierkegaard was a pretty cool guy. Today I think he would be diagnosed with some kind of mental disorder. But aren't we all a little bit crazy?
He was a great philosopher and theologian in Denmark in the 1800s, I think. Good old Soren wrote piercing rebukes of the lukewarm European church, of the sinful, impotent "Christendom." Fascinating stuff. And he wrestled so hard with his God. His diary compels and terrifies in its descriptions of incalculable suffering. 
He wrote, "To love God and to be loved by God is to suffer." The depth of this truth grows clearer as I grow older. If loving God is easy, we aren't doing it properly. If we aren't second-guessing, pushing through hurts, crying for the pain of the world... we're doing it wrong. Of course, Soren is being very one-sided here. To love God is not constant suffering. If it were, nobody could bear it. The same God who draws us to the cross raises us from the dead, and tells us the good news ahead of time. 
I feel I've earned the right to call old Soren by his first name. I think I know him pretty well.
"If Christianity were truthfully presented as suffering, ever greater as one advances further in it:doubt would be disarmed, and in any case there would have been no opportunity for being superior-- where it would have been a matter of avoiding pain." Yes. Doubt is a nice word for what happens when the living sacrifice keeps trying to crawl off the altar. A lot of the time, anyway. 
"O my God, it was thou who didst hold thy hand over me so that in the long hours of anguish I should not become guilty of procuring an abortion," Soren says, and I almost chuckle at the image of him, dark-haired, skinny, in Victorian garb, pregnant. But birth is like the great drama of faith, and all of us are in labor, in some stage. He has the faith to praise God who held his hand through it all.