The Uses of Adversity…

“Sweet are the uses of adversity . . .” is often cited from Shakespeare, but adversity seems not always sweet or acceptable, as personally applied. It isn’t easy to concede, even to ourselves, that it may be good when things don’t go just the way we want them. And it is difficult to face the fact that there may be purpose in sorrows and setbacks. Yet many have expressed themselves along these lines. “It has done me good,” said Longfellow, “to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life.” “A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner . . .” observed an unknown author. “Affliction comes to us all,” said Henry Ward Beecher, “not to make us sad, but sober; not to make us sorry, but wise.” Yet, despite all this, we shouldn’t go around looking for trouble nor suppose that it was all intended, or comes from a Providential source. To the contrary, all of us should do all we can to avoid adversity. Nevertheless we cannot deny that untroubled and untried living is not the kind from which character comes. And while we are not looking for trouble and should most earnestly avoid it, prevent it, stay out of it⎯live the law, keep the commandments, observe precaution, prevent accident, avoid illness⎯yet some things unforeseen come into the lives of each of us, and when they come, what we learn, how we live with them, is the measure of the man. There is a testing time in every process, of every product, of every principle, and life itself is no exception. Heaven help us avoid all the troubles we reasonably can, and learn to meet, to solve, to adjust to what comes despite our best laid plans and purposes. “Adversity,” said Samuel Johnson, “has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.”