set-backs make you stronger

"Disappointments may come that seem to cripple our services and blast the first flowering of our endeavours. So withering, so needless, and cutting through all the pleasant platitudes with which we have comforted others--words so true, but so ineffective whent he iron is biting at the soul. Is it idle to speak of victory in such extremity? No, but the victory may be delayed. The tree from which the gardener shears the vigorous shoot might, if it could, feel that its best efforts were being thwarted, but the gardener knows, and the tree knows later, that the set-back for one year meant the putting forth of stronger, closer growth for the time to come. This year's life is not the whole life of the tree. Small comfort, one may say, for the shoot withering on the ground. True, but its real life remains in the tree, and the symmetry and beauty at last declares the wisdom of the gardener and the end at which he aimed. The disappointed one has perhaps lost that which was hped for now, but if the true life is in him, he will not die but will serve God better in another direction, and perhaps not in this life at all. As with trees so with men and women, present pruning is grievous, nevertheless afterwards grief is swallowed up in victory."