How great would it be if maturity could take its shape without us first walking the painful mile? Or if love did not insist upon the improvement of its object?
That would be the life! Or at the least it would seem to be so for a season before the mildewed scent of its mediocrity filled the room.
True maturity comes via the shoe’s worn-out sole. Love always desires the best for the one it loves, even if the resulting process looks only remotely like the varied sentiments to which we attach the word ‘love’.
The proverbs’ wordly-wise, unsentimental take on how things work brings love, discipline, and reproof into inconvenient proximity:
My child, do not despise the LORD’S discipline
or be weary of his reproof,
for the LORD reproves the one he loves,
as a father the son in whom he delights.
We, for our part, lust after peace and counsel others to do the same. An entire inventory of pious vocabulary exists to articulate the idolatry of ease, peace, and tranquil blessedness. Meanwhile, unconsulted, the voice of the Proverbs implores us not to mistake those things for forward movement.
If the Lord really does reprove the one he loves and lavishes discipline upon his favorite daughters and sons, then all conventional bets are off. This present affliction, this undying storm, this private, unhealing wound may in fact have a loving father’s fingerprints on it. Sometimes the stroke is in fact a caress.
Not always. Sometimes a slap is only a slap.
Yet what loss resides in never asking whether love rather than anger might move this fateful, burdensome, wounding hand.
Canter Bridge 
This must be believed for our faith to survive. Oh that our friends would pray that our faith not fail.