When Dr. Payson was asked by a friend, in a season of severe illness, if he could see any particular reason for the present dispensation, he replied- “No; but I am as well satisfied as if I could see ten thousand. God’s will is the very perfection of all reason.”

… 

in suffering and weakness, you are brought to “Lie passive in His hands, And know no will but His!”

The discipline of patience is another light blending with the shadows of sickness. No unimportant or untimely grace of the Spirit is this; the development and culture of which finds no school more appropriate, or discipline more effectual, than that of ‘pining sickness.’

The continuous endurance of unmitigated pain- the prolonged and deathly weakness- the failure of skill and remedies to promote a cure- the morbid irritability and fretting almost inseparable from the prolongation of suffering- and the remembrance of duties neglected, of affairs deranged, of expenses incurred- all conspire to render the discipline of patience the most needed and precious; and when attained, to shed one of the most luminous graces of the Spirit upon the shaded picture of bodily disease.

Lights and Shadows of Spiritual Life
Octavius Winslow