Many a time, [suffering] is necessary discipline for us in the building of our own characters. Mark you, God’s great concern is for what we are, not what we seem to be, for our inner, deeper selves. Again and again, trouble is God’s disciplinary teacher to give us the experience that will refine us, teach us, cleanse us, and fit us, that we may be and do in God’s sight what he desires. You and I are the pupils at school, and God has many teachers. One of his teachers that comes robed in black is suffering, is trial, is deepest, darkest testing. David said, “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees” (Ps. 119:71). Oh, we need, my friends, to be disenchanted! Ease is the bane of everything that is good. We need to be disenchanted, so that our trust will not be in the flesh nor in the world, but fixed firmly on the living God. – George W. Truett

 Diana Wallis, Take Heart: Daily Devotions with the Church’s Great Preachers, (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2001), 120.