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Be Not Afraid sufferinghorrific bad luck and no guarantees. We like to pretendlife is different from that, more like a game we canactually win with the right strategy, but it isn’t.Speaking of blessings, perhaps one of the greatestis the ability to find meaning in what appears to bemeaningless suffering. I say “meaningless” because aslong as pain serves an obvious purpose – the pangs ofchildbirth, the soreness of exercise, or the surgeon’sscalpel –we are content to accept it. But when we cannotsee a rhyme or reason to it, most of us will react like acat on an operating table, which (as C. S. Lewis pointsout) cannot possibly know the difference between a vetand a vivisector, and will therefore scratch and bite thefirst just as vigorously as the second.It is all the more remarkable, then, to discoversomeone like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who notonly submitted humbly to hardships he could notunderstand, but also let them change him. A famoussurvivor of Siberia’s worst labor camps, Solzhenitsynstruggled for years to make sense of his imprisonment.If the state of his confinement was really a matter offate, and indicated that he was evil, he reasoned, itshould be easy enough to accept it. But then whatabout those who received even crueler punishmentsthan imprisonment, those who were shot or burned111