In times like these, as I cash in my coins and gather up my aluminum cans to take to the recycler, I am tempted to fantasize about a life without struggles, where every need is met and I don't have to worry about the next day. But those fantasies are short lived, as I think about everything that a life filled with struggles gives me.

Adversity may seem undesirable, but it is inevitable. From birth, as a woman and child deal with powerful adversity to allow the child to be born, to death, when we end our lives gasping for our final breaths, we will know adversity. But as the child pushes itself from the womb, it is that very struggle that helps compress the child to draw its first breath as it emerges from the room, something that must be done for it to begin its life outside the womb. And if it weren't for the pains of labor, childbirth would be happening at an even greater rate, and our children would have even less value than they already do. I believe the pain and adversity help us to appreciate the lives of our offspring even more.

Where there is struggle, there is value. Just as a soldier values a conquered beachhead because of the struggle they took to take it, and as someone from third world countries values freedom and opportunity because of the years of oppression they experienced prior to their current existence, we value things when they have taken struggle on our part to achieve. This is why the "dumbing down" of the American schools and the attitude of making everyone equal hurts our students: if there are no mountains to climb, our children will never know the joy of reaching the summit.

And so, we should not try to avoid adversity, but rather, to meet it with expectation and hope of what overcoming the challeges presented to us will give us. Through adversity, we grow, we learn, and we become better and stronger people.