There is a beautiful passage in the Tales of the Hassidim translated by Martin Buber, in which he tells about a man, a rabbi, who lived in appalling misery and yet every morning and every evening thanked God for his generous gifts.
One of those who heard his prayer said to him, ‘How can you be so hypocritical? Don’t you see that God has given you nothing?’ And he said, ‘No, you are mistaken. God looked on me and thought, “This man, to be saved, needs hunger and thirst and cold and loneliness and illness and dereliction.” And he has given me these things in abundance’. This is the true, Christian attitude, the attitude of a believer for whom the soul really matters. And this is what the return of the Prodigal Son to himself shows us.
Metropolitan Anthony Bloom