St Symeon the New Theologian: Whoever renounces the world and worldly things...

Whoever renounces the world and worldly things with unhesitating faith in God believes that the Lord is compassionate and merciful and that He receives those who come to Him in repentance.

But he knows, too, that God honors His servants with dishonor, enriches them with the utmost poverty, and glorifies them by means of insults and scorn, making them through death participants and inheritors of eternal life.

Through such trials the servant of God is impelled like a panting hart to the deathless fountain (cf. Ps. 42:1); and through them he climbs upwards, as though up a ladder on which angels ascend and descend (cf. Gen. 28:12; John 1:51) in order to help those who are mounting.

God is enthroned above, observing the strength of our intention and diligence, not because He enjoys seeing us struggle, but because He wishes, compassionate as He is, to give us our reward as if it were something He owed us.

St Symeon the New Theologian
One Hundred and Fifty-Three Practical and Theological Texts

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