In one song from their classic rock opera Tommy, the Who sing, "Sickness will take the mind where the mind doesn't usually go."  The Who were of course singing of the boy Tommy whose inability to see or hear gave him extraordinary psychic powers, but the point is that physical breakdown often does enable people to see things that they ordinarily would not.  The writer Flannery O'Connor, famous for penning novels of the American South while suffering from immense physical handicap (lupus), testifies aptly to this.  Her novels present people in various stages of physical and emotional duress (as she was throughout her short life) and the redemption that they eventually find in living through them.
     Most psychologists will tell us that suffering, however unpleasant, rightly absorbed and apprehended, can lead to some level of personal redemption as well.  Why?  It is indeed a broken world.  It does not run perfectly, and bad things happen.  Consequently, those who are living in the world, animal or human frequently experience hardship and suffering.
     On the other hand, this present world is all, for the time being, we have, and whether we are existentialists who believe we are "thrown" into the world or people, sometimes of faith, sometimes not, who believe that we are here for a reason, we all are living in it.  And we will have troubles.
     The redemptive lesson here is that in this broken world the only way that we can overcome it, metaphorically speaking, is not to try to avoid it, but rather to embrace it.  For it is in embracing that we overcome.  Not that we welcome suffering and pain, but that if we and the world really have purpose (an idea which most of us, in some way, believe), we will only find this purpose if we look, really look, at and engage in the world to see.
      That's why in a broken Jesus truth shines most clearly; if we were perfect, we would not need God.