Malcolm Muggeridge said once during an interview, “ As an old man…looking back on one’s life, it’s one of the things that strikes you most forcibly—that the only thing that’s taught anyone anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life’s about—the joy of understanding, the joy of coming into contact with what life really signifies—is suffering and affliction.”
Solzhenitsyn who, in referring to a disruptive moment(s) in his own life in the Gulag, wrote, “It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually, it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes, not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but through every human heart, and through all human hearts. So bless you, prison, for having been in my life.”
So like the great Russian writer, I have gradually become thankful for my disruptive moments. They have forced me inward and downward into soul territory….almost every useful encounter I have had with God has occurred in the wake of a disruptive moment. And as a result, I have not been the same.
(Gordon MacDonald, “The Life God Blesses”)