The Uses of Adversity

​“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”

— William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Mikal Johnson

Modern culture tends to divide suffering into two categories: meaningless tragedy to be escaped as quickly as possible, or inspirational hardship packaged into motivational slogans. Neither view is particularly honest.

The older vision was harsher, stranger, and, I think, truer.

Scripture repeatedly returns to the wilderness.

Humanity is expelled east of Eden, back to the wilderness from whence God had moved them.
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Israel wanders in the desert.
Prophets flee into lonely places.
Christ is driven into the wilderness before beginning His ministry.
Even after the Resurrection, the Christian life is never described as a return to comfortable innocence, but as a pilgrimage, exile, endurance, carrying a cross.

This is deeply inconvenient theology.

Most of us would prefer God to reveal Himself through uninterrupted prosperity, emotional certainty, and obvious answers. Yet the Biblical pattern suggests that comfort often obscures what adversity reveals.

In the Book of Hosea, God says something almost alarming:

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.”

The wilderness is not described merely as punishment, but as severe mercy. A stripping away. A removal of illusions. Civilization fills our ears with noise; the desert leaves a man alone with reality.

That does not make suffering good in itself. The Bible is far too honest for that. Death remains an enemy. Grief remains grief. Christ weeps at Lazarus’ tomb even knowing resurrection is moments away, because he feels the pain of those who don’t know.

But Christianity has always insisted on a dangerous possibility: affliction may become revelation.

That idea echoes powerfully through the music of Daniel Amos, particularly in the song The Uses of Adversity:
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“Don’t send me rain if I bloom in drought
No, don’t send me certainty
If somehow, it’s best for me to doubt”

That is not the voice of someone glorifying misery. It is the voice of someone recognizing that certainty is not the same thing as faith.

Faith that has never wrestled with doubt is often merely inherited confidence. Untested assumptions. A house never examined because no storm has yet arrived.

The modern world tends to imagine skepticism as difficult and belief as easy. Yet existentially, the opposite is often true. Cynicism demands very little from us. Hope demands endurance. Love demands vulnerability. Faithfulness demands persistence long after emotional reassurance has vanished.

Steve Taylor’s Harder to Believe Than Not To puts it:
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“They shiver with doubts that were left unattended
Then they toss away the cloak that they should have mended
You know by now why the chosen are few
It's harder to believe than not to.”

​That last line lands because it rejects sentimental religion. There are seasons when faith does not feel triumphant or emotionally satisfying. There are nights where God seems hidden behind thunderclouds, where prayers echo back unanswered, where one kneels in Gethsemane wondering whether abandonment itself has become the final truth.

And yet Christianity stubbornly places its central revelation not in worldly victory, but in crucifixion.

Not the avoidance of suffering.
Transformation through suffering.

The Cross does not teach us to love pain.
It teaches us that love can endure pain without being conquered by it.

The distinction matters.

The Dark Night of the Soul, by 16th-century Spanish mystic Juan de la Cruz, is not, as people think, about depression. It’s about God coming to meet his beloved in the darkness. It’s a poem about faith, even in the darkest times.

There is a great danger in romanticizing adversity. Some wounds are simply wounds. Some tragedies remain mysteries this side of eternity. The Book of Job exists largely to demolish simplistic explanations for suffering. The friends who insist they understand exactly why Job suffers are rebuked by God in the end.

Sometimes the only honest answer is silence.

But silence is not the same thing as meaninglessness.

Again and again, both Scripture and human experience suggest that adversity can uncover truths prosperity conceals. Hardship exposes idols. Failure humiliates pride. Grief clarifies love. Mortality forces the soul to ask whether anything eternal exists beneath the noise and appetite of ordinary life.

And strangely enough, many who have walked through great suffering emerge not emptied of wonder, but more capable of perceiving it.

The wilderness that first appeared barren becomes charged with presence.

As another Daniel Amos lyric says:

“You’re in the light and in the dark
In the peace and in the chaos.”
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That may be the deepest lesson adversity teaches: reality is not divided neatly between sacred moments and godless ones. The holy may remain hidden even in sorrow, exile, uncertainty, and failure.

Perhaps especially there.

The old sacramental imagination understood this better than we do. It saw “sermons in stones,” holiness in ordinary bread and wine, traces of eternity in strangers’ faces, in rainstorms, in laughter, in tears. Not because suffering itself is sacred, but because God has never confined Himself to comfort.

We spend much of our lives trying to escape vulnerability, limitation, and dependence. Yet those very things may be what crack open the illusion of self-sufficiency and make a genuine encounter possible.

The wilderness hurts because it removes distractions.

But once the noise dies down, one begins to hear things otherwise drowned out.

A voice in the silence.
Water in dry places.
The sound of one’s own soul.
And perhaps, faintly at first, the presence of God Himself.
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“Remember that these forty years the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness, so that He might humble you and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep His commandments”
(Deuteronomy 8:2).

​In His Name, Mikal