Paul is not romanticising suffering. He is tracing a chain of formation: suffering leads to perseverance, perseverance to character, character to hope. The logic only holds if you believe something is being made in the furnace. I have sat with people in real pain and this passage has both comforted and unsettled me. It comforts because it insists the suffering is not wasted. It unsettles because it demands we trust a process we cannot always see. The hope Paul speaks of is not wishful thinking. It is the settled confidence of someone who has been through the furnace and found it did not destroy them.
The chain of formation you describe — I have seen it play out in my own life and in the lives of people I have walked alongside. It is real, even when it does not feel real.
What I appreciate here is that you hold both the comfort and the unsettling quality together. That is more honest than most treatments of this passage.
Settled confidence — that is a much better description of hope than what I usually hear. Thank you for that.