Every trouble is an opportunity to win the grace of strength.  Whatever else trouble is in the world for, it is here for this good purpose: to develop strength.  For a trouble is a moral and spiritual task.  It is something which is hard to do.  And it is in the spiritual world as in the physical, strength is increased by encounter with the difficult.  A world without any trouble in it would be, to people of our kind, a place of spiritual enervation and moral laziness.  Fortunately, every day is crowded with care.  Every day to every one of us brings its questions, its worries, and its tasks, brings its sufficiency of trouble.  Thus we get our daily spiritual exercise.  Every day we are blessed with new opportunities for the development of strength of soul.  –George Hodges

And from where comes our ability to grow in strength and in the power of the Spirit?  For how often I feel the lack of strength, of endurance, of fortitude.

An hour at the foot of the Cross steadies the soul as nothing else can.  --L Cowman

For Calvary interprets human life;

No path of pain but there we meet our Lord; 

and all the strain, the terror and the strife

Die down like waves before His peaceful word,

And nowhere but beside the awful Cross,

And where the olives grow along the hill,

Can we accept the unexplained, the loss,

The crushing agony, and hold us still.”

--Amy Carmichael