I love this point that highlights how meaning is not always attained through happiness.
Can you find difficulty more meaningful than leisure?
Of course, you can.
See, adversity might never be as pleasurable as being idle, however, it is nearly always more meaningful.
Remember that suffering is not suffering when meaning is attached to it.
With meaning and purpose, suffering becomes sacrifice.
Malcolm Muggeridge put it in these words: Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the same time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has enhanced and truly enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence… the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal and trivial to be endurable. This, of course, is what the cross signifies. And it is the cross, more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.
-Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale, Why Suffering?
