Don’t dig up in doubt what you planted in faith. - Elisabeth Elliott
So many people around me are in seasons of waiting, grieving, struggling, or simply enduring the small daily disappointments and annoyances that threaten to chip away at our peace. I find myself exasperated with The Almighty more than I’d care to admit. Isn’t it enough already? When will it be enough?
But like so many of you, I've lived a long time, and I know the Christian life isn't a neat trajectory to glory. There is no straight line from struggle to victory. The life of a Jesus follower is instead a beautiful, messy, sacred, and sometimes stumbling dance between hope and heartache… between gladness and sadness… between it’s all falling apart and I’ll fly away.
But to this I cling white-knuckled, though a bit weary and worn: God is sovereign, and nothing touches me that isn’t first sifted through His hands. In fact, I have to repeat these truths to myself with enough frequency that they’ll replace so much other useless content in the bookshelves of my mind. The truth of God’s character is the only thing that holds when life gets hard. 90’s power ballad lyrics don’t hold. The fact that I can quote 10 seasons of Friends doesn’t hold. Retail therapy doesn’t hold. Netflix binges don’t hold. Christianese doesn’t hold. Substances don’t hold. The only thing that holds is the character of God and the promises He’s made to us.
It’s based on that character and those promises that I can believe there is always something bigger at play authored by Someone who sees the end from the beginning. While I’m sitting here trying to make sense of the tattered mess of thread on the back of the tapestry, He’s adeptly weaving every strand into the beautiful artwork on the front. So if we’re going to do more than merely survive this life, we’ve got to have the gumption to take Jesus at His Word in the messy middle.
Scripture doesn’t just tell us, it promises us that God will make everything right in the end, that every tear will be wiped away, that (as Sally Lloyd-Jones so perfectly put it in the Jesus Storybook Bible) "everything sad will come untrue." But knowing all will be well doesn't make today's hard any less hard.
Don’t Take The Bypass
Because we want to be people who say we believe what God says (even though we’re not sure how), there’s a temptation to rush past the present pain to get to the promised healing. We quote Romans 8:28, we remind each other that God works all things together for good, we speak of the hope we have in Christ (all true, all necessary), but sometimes I think we feel like we're supposed to skip over the actual experience of difficulty in ensuring we look like people who are trusting God. Like if people see us struggling under the heavy weight of grief, anger, or disappointment we’ve somehow been outed as people who don’t “really” believe God.
I've caught myself doing this. When someone shares their struggle, I want to fast-forward them to the part where God redeems it all. Yay! When I'm in my own mess, I want to spiritually leapfrog over the uncomfortable middle and land safely in the "it all worked out" epilogue. Victory! That’s MUCH easier to make a pretty Instagram caption for with a profound Scripture attached.
But what if the waiting is the work? What if learning to hold both the promise and the pain simultaneously is precisely where God meets us and shapes us most profoundly? That seems a whole lot more like what Paul was always writing about in, oh, I don’t know, um… the majority of the New Testament. UGH.
It Will Hold
One thing we all have to reckon with is that the truth that all will be well isn't meant to minimize our present struggles; it's meant to be what holds us steady while we navigate them. There's a difference between pretending hard things aren't hard and walking through hard things with the assurance they won't have the final word.
Jesus shows us this walk of assurance in a visceral way. The very same Jesus who said to His disciples, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world,” in John 16:33 still did not spiritually bypass His anguish with a bunch of “pull it together, Jesus, you know better than this,” language in Gethsemane. Instead, we have the word “agony” used to describe His experience. Luke 22:44 says: "And being in agony He prayed more earnestly; and His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground."
Scientists have long said that this sort of description can be scientifically explained by hematohidrosis, a condition where extreme emotional stress or anxiety causes capillaries near the sweat glands to rupture, and as a result, blood mixes with sweat and is exuded from the skin.
And for the “but English isn’t the original language of Scripture” argument, a short search of a lexicon reveals that the word agony in Luke 22:44 comes from the Greek word ἀγωνίᾳ (agōnía), which means anguish, extreme suffering, or severe struggle, drawing from its root meaning of an athletic contest or struggle for victory.
So while I’m not adding to Scripture by saying hematohidrosis is what occurred, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Jesus experienced the FULLness of His difficulty. In fact, He experienced it unto death (Phil. 2:8). He asked that the cup pass from Him, and He felt the full weight of what was before Him. But He also surrendered to the Father's will, trusting that God's plan, however painful, was still good.
If Jesus didn't skip over the hard, even in His wholehearted submission and obedience, even in His “I have overcome the world” assurance, then perhaps neither should we.
Practical Prompts for Hard Days
So how do we live in this tension? How do we navigate genuinely difficult seasons while holding onto the promise that all WILL be well? How do we avoid being Christians who sing, “so I’ll throw up my hands, and praise you again and again ‘cause all that I have is a halleluuuuuuuujah” when all is well, but then have nothing even resembling a hallelujah when all falls apart? How do we not be fake “fine” but also not be hemorrhaging hopelessness?
Well, here are some practices I'm trying:
1. Name the Hard Without Shame
Give yourself permission to feel what you're feeling without immediately rushing to fix it or spiritualize it away. Your feelings were given to you by God as indicators. While they cannot be leaders, they are indicators. What are they indicating? God already knows it's hard. He's not surprised by your struggle or disappointed in your honest emotions. The Psalms are full of David's raw, unfiltered feelings, and God preserved them for us in Scripture. Lament is not just helpful, it’s biblical. Name the feelings back to the One who gave you feelings in the first place.
2. Practice the Power of the Pause
When you feel overwhelmed, pause and ask: "What’s true right now?" Perhaps most importantly, two things can be true simultaneously. Yes, this situation is difficult. And yes, God is still sovereign. The power of the pause lies in creating space between the feelings and your response to them. Remember, they’re indicators, but they shouldn’t be leaders. The pause protects the process.
3. Look for God's Presence in the Present
I know, I know… the amount of “p’s” and now the pithy statement make it tempting to dismiss all this outright. But sticky statements help us remember. So instead of only looking for how God might redeem this later, look for where He is showing up right now. Is it in a friend who brings dinner? A moment of unexpected peace (ya know, like the one that passes understanding?) A Scripture that speaks directly to your heart? God doesn't only work in the outcomes, He's actively present in the process. I could even argue that he might be more interested in the process than the outcome.
4. Find Your Sea Legs
On days when your feelings are all over the place, return to what doesn't change. Rather than searching for the dock where you can get off the boat of your feelings, find your sea legs. I love Webster’s definition of sea legs: bodily adjustment to the motion of a ship, indicated especially by the ability to walk steadily and by freedom from seasickness. There is a way not to be dominated by your feelings and it isn’t to outrun, anesthetize, or bypass them. Find your sea legs. God's character. His promises. His love for you. These aren't dependent on your circumstances improving; they're what will help you find your sea legs regardless of what's swirling around you. Meditate on what’s true. Pray God’s promises back to Him.
5. Surrender Your Timeline
We all want to know when the hard will end and the healing will begin. This is normal for finite time-bound creatures. But part of trusting God's sovereignty means releasing our grip on the "when" and choosing to trust the "Who." His timing is perfect, even when it's not our preferred timing. And did you know it’s possible to begin healing while still hurting? That’s for another day. For today, pray, “God, when I become obsessed with when, help me instead to trust in Who.”
6. Get Your People
I cannot say this enough: DO NOT walk through hard seasons alone. The enemy of our souls is hell-bent on our isolation from those who will help us carry the weight. But God uses community as one of the primary ways He sustains us. Find people who won't try to fix or talk you out of your struggles but who will sit with you in them and remind you of truth when you can't see it clearly yourself.
Everything Sad Will Come Untrue
I love that phrase because it captures something beautiful about God's redemptive work. He doesn't just make bad things less bad, He makes everything sad come untrue. Not forgotten. Not minimized. But completely undone and transformed. New heaven. New earth. Until that day, we live in the already-but-not-yet. We live with the promise and the pain. We hold both the assurance of future wholeness and the reality of present brokenness.
This isn't a design flaw in the Christian life. Instead, it's where faith is forged. It's in the holding of both that we discover our sea legs and we realize truth is more true than we ever imagined.
All will be well, friends. But first, it will be hard. And in that "first," in that sacred, difficult space between promise and fulfillment, God is present, God is working, and God is making us more like Jesus. Which, it turns out, is the point all along.
If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us. As it is, there’s not much chance of that. You know for yourselves that we’re not much to look at.
We’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but we’re not demoralized; we’re not sure what to do, but we know that God knows what to do; we’ve been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn’t left our side; we’ve been thrown down, but we haven’t broken. What they did to Jesus, they do to us—trial and torture, mockery and murder; what Jesus did among them, he does in us—he lives! Our lives are at constant risk for Jesus’ sake, which makes Jesus’ life all the more evident in us. While we’re going through the worst, you’re getting in on the best!
We’re not keeping this quiet, not on your life. Just like the psalmist who wrote, “I believed it, so I said it,” we say what we believe. And what we believe is that the One who raised up the Master Jesus will just as certainly raise us up with you, alive. Every detail works to your advantage and to God’s glory: more and more grace, more and more people, more and more praise!
So we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.
2 Corinthians 4:7-18 | The Message | Paraphrased by Eugene Peterson
How are you learning to hold both the promise and the pain in your current season? I'd love to hear how God is showing up in your "first it will be hard" moments.
Always such amazing insight…thank you for this!
This is so helpful Shannon!