Goodness renders life valid and important

"I admire you sincerely for the courage, resignation and strength of soul with which you have accepted and borne your heavy cross. You alone, who have experienced the weight of your mortified life, have been able to measure its burden.

One who has always been well cannot understand what suffering means, above all the suffering that does not concede one moment of respite. I am with you always with my thoughts and with prayer: that the Lord may lighten your suffering and help you always to understand better that it is not physical efficiency that renders life valid and important but goodness. And He certainly will not fail to compensate with eternal joy the bitterness of these days of yours."

-- From a letter from Fr Attilio of St Joseph (Sergio Sorgon), ocd, to his sister Lavinia 22 November 1968.

** Fr Attilio was a missionary carmelite assassinated in Madagascar in 1985.