" The late Anglican pastor John Stott argued that he could never believe in God were it not for the cross. As he put it, in a world of such horrors—burned children and battered women and concentration camps and genocides—how could one believe in a God who was agnostic of all of that? Stott wrote that he had visited temples in Asia in which he stood before the statues of a placid, remote-looking Buddha, with arms crossed, eyes closed, softly smiling. His imagination was forced to turn away and to turn instead “to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! "

― Russell D. Moore , The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home