Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Blue

A clergyman calling problems his soul's "plusses" is a small act of rhetorical jujitsu: it flips the usual moral accounting from deficits to assets, pain to profit. Lionel Blue is doing pastoral triage with a smile. The line refuses the modern self-help reflex to "fix" yourself into smoothness. Instead, it suggests that difficulty is not merely survivable but spiritually legible - a kind of evidence.

The key move is that sly qualifier: "seen spiritually". Blue isn't denying the real-world bite of problems; he's changing the lens. In spiritual vision, the metric isn't comfort or efficiency but formation. "Plusses" is deliberately odd, almost breezy, as if sanctity were a balance sheet and suffering could be entered on the credit side. That tonal lightness matters: it keeps the thought from turning into grim piety or cheap consolation. He's not romanticizing hardship; he's reclaiming agency over its meaning.

Subtextually, the sentence argues against shame. Problems often arrive with a hidden accusation: something is wrong with you. Blue replies that what feels like failure may be the very site where a soul develops its distinctive capacities - humility, compassion, patience, dependence. It also carries a quiet warning to the satisfied: a life without friction can produce a thinner interior.

Contextually, Blue wrote and spoke as a public-facing religious voice in an increasingly secular Britain, and as someone open about complexity and struggle. The line reads like a bridge between private anguish and public faith: not an escape hatch from pain, but a method for translating it into a deeper kind of gain.