Bear your share of hardship for the Gospel with the strength that comes from God.

You never know what you’re being prepared for. I don’t remember where I first heard or learned this, but I’ve repeated
it to myself and others many times because it helps me take a long view of the moment’s difficulties or upsets or reversals or opportunities. . . . [W]isdom cannot be bought or won or acquired by effort, but is the fruit of what we undergo, how we endure. In our moments of deepest awareness, we encounter a mighty and mysterious divinity who, Hamlet reminds us, “shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” and we must choose either to rebel against or to submit to the hewing and honing that prepares us to be wise elders and faithful servants.
In spite of ourselves, life equips us for what we can’t foresee and sometimes dread. The value of autobiography and memoir lies largely in the way the backward glance makes this process visible. “This is what the past is for!” Corrie ten Boom writes. “Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.” We see it later. All of us, I imagine, have had occasion to recognize that had one difficult thing not happened, another, which has made all the difference, would not have happened either. “Sorrow prepares us for joy,” Rumi writes, and though, out of context, such a claim can sound glib, it is worth pondering and witnessing in the lives of those who have, as one older woman simply put it, “been through things.” Though suffering doesn’t necessarily make people wise, it seems that wisdom rarely, if ever, comes without some suffering.

Marilyn McEntyre, Where the Eye Alights

Marilyn McEntyre is author of numerous books on language and faith, including Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and Make a List: How a Simple Practice Can Change Our Lives and Open Our Hearts.