What are the Characteristics of a NT Christian?

[GrandizerII]

I don't know that there is a God and that he grieves and suffers with us in our darkest hours. If there is a God who loves us, then I would expect him to demonstrate this love in a manner that is consistent with how we normally view love. I cannot reasonably consider it divine love when God allows all sorts of evils and sufferings to occur in this world. I can understand minor sufferings being consistent with a loving God, but not major evils and sufferings.

Sounds reasonable in the abstract. All I'm asking is for you to look at it from within the scope of your everyday experience. For whatever reason, there is pain and suffering in my life. I don't know why and I'm not sure it matters. What I do know is that I don't trust me to lift myself out of my own troubles all by myself. I've tried willpower and it didn't work. YMMV but sometimes it's more effective to surrender and call on someone strong enough to deliver me. Maybe it's not clear how His love works for the entire world. I only know how His love works for me.

That's fine, and if you needed to say that to let it all out, that's fine as well. But after what I've come to learn in life, going through certain experiences that shed quite some light on a lot of things I wasn't aware of before, I just can't ever think the way you do now. It would be nice to have someone powerful to be on my side, but I also care about love and compassion for other people, especially those less fortunate than me. Dictators have a lot of power in the countries they rule, but they are the last people I would expect to really love their people. A constantly neglectful father has a lot of power as a paternal parent, but I would not expect him to all of a sudden pick his child up and give him love. We live in a world where good things don't always occur to good people, and where abuses are rampant and often go unpunished, and where even good people can sometimes end up hurting other good people. It's a complicated (and sometimes cruel) world we're in, and I have come to accept it as it is, rather than pretend there is something really, really great out there beyond our imaginations who will help us when the day comes or something like that (especially when we don't even see indicators of such a great thing, and when we are suffering anyway and nothing is being done to relieve us from our current suffering on the part of the supposedly divine).