Malcolm Muggeridge was a journalist who became a Christian later in life. He died in 1990.
I have an old copy of some of his writings that somebody around here gave me. As I have dipped into it a few times I find some loopy speculations (he had some odd ideas about Christianity) and also some amazingly well put truths.
Muggeridge is making some serious sense in the following:
Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful, with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo jumbo . . . the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal or trivial to be endurable. This of course is what the cross of Christ signifies, and it is the cross more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.