The Importance Of Adversity In Life

Kevin Conroy once said, “Everyone is handed adversity in life. No one’s journey is easy. It’s how they handle it that makes people unique.” Dictionary.com defines adversity as “adversity n. adverse or unfavorable fortune or fate; a condition marked by misfortune, calamity, or distress.” Adversity is something that everyone will experience at some point in his life; however, some people face greater adversities than others. Morrie Schwartz and Elie Wiesel are two men that faced two of the greatest adversities that this world knows. Elie is a survivor of Adolf Hitler’s destruction of the Holocaust, and Morrie Schwartz was a simple man who lost a battle to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS. Both of these men’s lives have been captured in best-selling
Faith is something that some people have, and some people do not. It is as simple as that. Elie Wiesel was a man of faith whenever he entered his journey into concentration camp. He prayed often while in Auschwitz. While laying in his cot, he would sometimes sing religious melodies (Wiesel 45). Elie knew that the only thing that was going to get him through the adversity that he was facing during the Holocaust, was his faith. He leaned on it, and he depended on it to keep him alive. Although he leaned on it, he started to lose it at the end of the novel. When the adversity was letting up, when the war was almost over, he had lost himself, and his faith in God. In Tuesdays with Morrie, Morrie Schwartz does not come out and say that he is a religious man. Mitch asks him one day if he believes that God is testing his faith like He did with Job’s in the Bible. Morrie answers Mitch by saying, “I think God overdid it” (Albom 151). This signifies that Morrie does have faith, but he sometimes has trouble understanding why God has done this to him. Morrie faces his adversity with faith in his heart, and I believe that that is what got him through his sickness, just like Elie’s faith got him through the