When some "bad" thing happens to you, how do you usually react? Seemingly like many other people, I used to react "Why does this happen to me?" I don't remember exactly when, but some time ago, I changed this question to "What does this try to teach me?"
These two questions can be summarized as לָמָּה lama 'why" and לְמָה lema 'for what' in Hebrew. This small change in vocalization in Hebrew has brought about a big change in how I see what my ego used to interpret as "bad" things. Simply put, these "bad" things, or life challenges, have stopped being sources for lamenting and suffering and started becoming opportunities for spiritual growth.
In my case, and probably in the case of many other people who have experienced this life-changing shift, lived experience preceded conceptual understanding. Faced with one life challenge I had never experienced before, I spent some time asking myself why this "bad" thing happened to me, until I exhausted all the possible answers, none of which fully convinced me.
Then the only thing that was left to me was to ask this very question and the assumption behind it. I used to assume conceptually that the Universe isn't always kind to us. But now I'm more and more convinced experientially that it has our back after all.
My formal systematic study of Chabad Chassidus has also strengthened this experiential conviction of mine. Of all the courses I took for the period of three academic years in Jerusalem the most unforgettable one was "Faith and Confidence" - faith that everything is good, and confidence that G-d will give me the power to discover that everything is good.
In retrospect, all my subsequent life challenges have been precious opportunities for internalizing this confidence, and each one of them has helped me grow spiritually in one specific area of life or another. Again, what has enabled this far-reaching change in how I related to life challenges in a tiny change in the vocalization of one Hebrew word.
My present ongoing challenge is to see goodness in any new life challenge while I'm still in the middle of experiencing it, and not after the fact. Of course, this challenge is an enormous one, but the same old narrative by the ego seems to be becoming weaker and weaker and less and less convincing.
PS: While preparing this writing, I had a new experience of accompanying someone who was experiencing a very difficult life challenge, and immediately realized without knowing how yet that not only our own life challenges but also someone else's can be turned into opportunities for spiritual growth.