Suffering as a Path to be Walked

Quote for the day:

"...suffering is not an end unto itself but a means to an end of renewing a living hope. Suffering thus becomes a valuable experience of living both immanently and transcendently in, by, and through the God who is both with us and beyond us, and ironically becomes an antidote to the pervasive idolatry of the self on which contemporary American society is so fixated. Such a living hope--founded and exercised in Jesus Christ--thus transforms our suffering from a barrier to be overcome to a path to be walked."
Chaplain (Colonel) Timothy S. Mallard, US Army, writing in Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy