“What arouses you from the sleep of self-assurance in which we are so easily lulled to sleep by times of earthly happiness… What will draw you out of the dangerous state of insensibility? Will not sorrows? Will not illness? What tears us away from our worldly attachments, the love for the world and all that is in it? Is it not necessity and misfortunes? Do not trials teach us to take life more seriously? Do not sorrows teach us to be prepared for death?”
(Martyr Archbishop John of Riga, ‘The Inevitability of Suffering’)