Margaret Clarkson shares the following:

"Pain is pain and sorrow is sorrow. It hurts. It limits. It impoverishes. It isolates. It restrains. It works devastation deep within the personality. It circumscribes in a thousand different ways. There is nothing good about it. But the gifts God can give with it are the richest the human spirit can know."

Making a statement like this is so incredibly difficult, because anything that we say about pain, struggle, and devastation can be construed as trivializing the challenges of lives that are affected by loss.  From people that I have spoken with over the years of my ministry however, I have come to understand that when God says that His strength if made perfect in weakness, He's on target.  

Pain and struggle teaches us valuable life lessons that we would otherwise not be privy to, but it also gives us the ability to see something from another's perspective, and to witness the love of God from a completely different dimension.  

God is not the author of pain and suffering, but He can use the inevitable to bring us closer to Him, and closer to understanding ourselves in the eternal scheme of things.

Lord, help me to understand that even when I am struggling, that You are there.  In Jesus name, amen!