"Some of us have suffered great physical pain that bites into our spirits and causes depression. Others have suffered heavy financial losses and been deprived even to the point of extreme hardship. Are you complaining against the Lord for this? I pray not! The Lord has been pruning you, cutting off your best branches; you seem to be continually tormented with the knife. Just suppose that your loving Lord has caused this; suppose that from His own hand all your grief has come, every cut and every gash. If this is true, put your finger to your lips and be quiet until from your heart you are able to say, 'The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord' (Job 1:21). Recently, I sat in the garden with my friend and secretary. We were in perfect health, rejoicing in the Lord's goodness. We were happy as we sat there reading the Word of God and meditating. Dare we think of being so happy? Within five days I was stricken with disabling pain, and worse, far worse, he was called upon to lose his wife. Here is our comfort: the Lord has done it. The best rose in the garden is gone. Who has taken it? The Gardener. He planted it and watched over it, and now He has taken it. Does anyone weep because of that? No! Everyone knows it is best that He should come and gather the garden's finest. Are you deeply troubled by the loss of your loved one? Remember, the next time the Lord comes to your part of the garden, He will only gather His flowers. Would you prevent Him from doing this, even if you could?"
"Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator--to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy. Lest we should think this is a hardship, this kind of good begins on a level far above the creatures, for God Himself, as Son, from all eternity renders back to God as Father by filial obedience the being which the Father by paternal love eternally generates in the Son. This is the pattern which man was made to imitate--which Paradisal man did imitate--and wherever the will conferred by the Creator is thus perfectly offered back in delighted and delighting obedience by the creature, there, most undoubtedly, is Heaven, and there the Holy Ghost proceeds. In the world as we now know it, the problem is how to recover this self-surrender. We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are, as Newman said, rebels who must lay down our arms. The first answer, then, to the question why our cure should be painful, is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous pain. Even in Paradise I have supposed a minimal self-adherence to be overcome, though the overcoming and the yielding, would there be rapturous. But to surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years of usurpation is a kind of death."
