IT IS GOOD FOR ME THAT I WAS AFFLICTED ...

It is good for me that I was afflicted,
that I might learn your statutes. Psalm 119:71

In the verses just prior to this, I prayed that the Lord would teach me good judgment (119:66).
Here my Lord tells me how I have been and shall be schooled in His statues.
Very little is to be learned without affliction because affliction brings what ease does not, reflection and examination.
Wisdom is the product of three elements – knowledge, experience, and reflection. Without reflection, there will be no examination of any experience with the knowledge I have.
Affliction is, as it were, God’s means of making me pause, making me take the time to look back over what I have experienced – that I might know the difference between my ways and His way.
Surely, this means that God's Word is best seen through the lens of my tears.
Abraham Wright speaks the truth of my afflictions:
Truly, I am mended by my sickness.
Surely I am enriched by my poverty.
Mightily am I strengthened by my weakness.
Surely, I must not frown upon the afflictions my Lord has unwillingly allowed to come and grieve me (Lament.3:33).
For though He cause me grief, He will have compassion according to the abundance of His steadfast love (Lament. 3:32).
Surely, my journey in such afflictions shall be as the journey of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace.
Surely, my afflictions are as the flames of that fiery furnace.
Surely, such flames of such afflictions will burn away the bonds of my ignorance of the divine, as the flames loosed these men’s of an ignorant king who thought he was divine.
Surely, in these afflictions I am no less companioned by one who is the Son of God, as were these men in the fiery furnace.
Surely I, like an ignorant king, shall be made the wiser when the furnace into which I am thrown, has finished the work my Lord intended for it.
And I shall glorify the Most High God.
Surely, my afflictions put the lie that Satan still whispers through my sinful pride: “You’ll be like God.”
Affliction like nothing else confronts me with the reality that I am not God.
For it is through afflictions that I am brought to the end of myself.
And it is only at the end of myself that I shall truly find Christ who has met me at my end on the Cross.
The Lord reveals to me through St. Peter that these afflictions come by necessity (1st Peter 1).
They come for the sake of my faith.
For the Lord assures me that such afflictions purify my faith as fire is used to purify gold.
As the refiner seeks by the fire of a furnace to remove all that is not gold, so much more so does my Lord seek by the fire of affliction to remove all that is not of faith – not of the Word.

“Take all that shall be brought upon thee: and in thy sorrow endure, and in thy humiliation keep patience.
For gold and silver are tried in the fire, but acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation.”
Wisdom of Sirach 2:4-5