Productivity Amid Suffering

Jerome wrote about a time of many illnesses in his life:

"The Lord 'who looks upon the earth and makes it tremble, who touches the mountains and they will smoke' [Ps 104:32], who says in the song of Deuteronomy, 'I shall kill and I shall make alive, I shall strike and I shall heal' [Deut 32:39], makes my earth tremble mightily as well by means of frequent sicknesses. It was said to it, 'Earth you are, and unto the earth you shall go' [Gen 3:19], and often forgetting my human condition, he reminds me to be aware that I am a man, and old, and at any time now I shall be dead. Of this it is written, 'Why do earth and ashes boast?' [Sir 10:9]. This is why the one who had struck me suddenly with an illness healed me with unbelievable speed, to frighten rather than crush, and to reform rather than to flog. And so, knowing that my whole life belongs to him, and that perhaps the reason my sleep is being postponed is so that I may complete the work I have begun on the prophets, I hand myself over completely to this pursuit. And stationed as it were in a watchtower, I survey the storms and shipwrecks of this world, not without groaning and pain. I do not think about the present but the future, nor about my reputation among men and their gossip, but I greatly tremble at the prospect of God's judgment [cf. Phil 2:12]. And you, Eustochium, virgin of Christ, who have aided this sick man by your prayers, pray also for the grace of Christ to be upon him now that he has been healed, so that by the same Spirit with which the prophets sang of the future, I may be able to enter into the cloud and the gloom [cf. Exod 20:21] and know God's words, which are heard not with ears of flesh but with those of the heart. May I say with the prophet, 'The Lord gives me a tongue of instruction, to know when it is fitting for me to speak' [Isa 50:4]." (Thomas Scheck, trans., St. Jerome: Commentary On Isaiah [Mahwah, New Jersey: The Newman Press, 2015], p. 631, section 14:1 in the commentary)