Even when life is difficult or challenging-especially when life is difficult and challenging-the present is always an opportunity for us to learn, grow, and become better than we've ever been before.

One of the few greatest satisfactions of this life is to handle problems efficiently and well.

Life is a challenge, we must take it.

A warrior accepts defeat. He does not treat it as a matter of indifference nor does he try to make a victory of it.

Charlie says that "God gives us a choice when we face difficult circumstances." We can choose misery or "we can choose to face our trials with God's help, knowing that we'll come out the other side as stronger people for the experience."

My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within; my heart is poured out on the ground … . I remember my affliction … the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.1

But my pain's a fair price, to take away your smile.

How strange, that bad soil, if the gods send rain and sun, Bears a rich crop, while good soil, starved of what it needs, Is barren; but man's nature is ingrained - the bad Is never anything but bad, and the good man Is good: misfortune cannot warp his character, His goodness will endure.

Sometimes life makes you older than your age.

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving--but he could not have her. So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems.