From Neal A. Maxwell and his book “All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience”:
Afflictions can soften us, sweeten us, and can be a chastening influence. (Alma 62:41.) We often think of chastening as something being done to punish us by a mortal tutor who is angry and peevish with us. Divine chastening, however, is a form of learning as it is administered by a loving Father. (Helaman 12:3.)
Elder James E. Faust of the Council of the Twelve said, “In the pain, the agony, and the heroic endeavors of life, we pass through the refiners fire, and the insignificant and the unimportant in our lives can melt away like dross and make our faith bright, intact and strong.” (Ensign May 1979, p. 53.) Elder Faust continued, “This change comes about through a refining process which often seems cruel and hard. In this way the soul can become like soft clay in the hands of the Master.”
It was President Hugh B. Brown who observed, “If we banish hardship we banish hardihood.” And, further, “One man’s disillusion may be another’s inspiration. The same exposure to pain, misery, and sorrow that coarsens the mind the soul of one may give to another the power of compassionate understanding and humility without which mere achievement remains primitive.” (New Era, December 1974, pp. 4-7.)
There are ironies, sometimes sublime ironies, in all of these experiences. We are often at the same time both the worker and him who is being worked. So much is often going on simultaneously. Therefore, as George MacDonald observed, “He who fancies himself a carpenter, finds himself but the chisel, or indeed perhaps only the mallet, in the hand of the true workman.” (Gifts of the Child Christ, p. 32)
We are accustomed to noting, in connection with sin, how “one thing leads to another.” And so it does. But the chain of righteous conduct operates in much the same way. Joseph, the son of Jacob in as story that we shall someday have the full and fascinating particulars of, overcame what could have been the disabling shock of being sold into slavery. The gall of bitterness was not in him then, nor had bad breaks made him mad. He later rose to positions of trust in the household of Potiphar. His same refusal to resent “all these things” was there subsequently in the unjust imprisonment of Joseph; his resilience could not have emerged if he had been a bitter prisoner. Should we then be surprised by his later anonymous generosity to his hungry brothers—the very brothers who sold him into slavery? Resilience begets resilience!
As one who suffered in a concentration camp, Victor Frankl observed that the one freedom that conditions cannot take from us is our freedom to form a healthy attitude to those very conditions, grim as they may sometimes be.
Thus, Joseph’s quality service to Potiphar and his management skills even in the jail where a clear foreshadowing of his brilliant service later on as the “prime minister” of the Pharaoh. But it all sprang from within; Joseph’s spiritual strength could not be shaken from things outside.
Bad breaks, therefore, need not break a good man (or woman); they may, with God’s help even make him (her) better! ~Neal A. Maxwell, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 1979), 39-40
