Even When it Hurts

My tendency toward binge-blogging is apparent again. 🙃 There is just much on my mind I want to get out somewhere productive.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Easter weekend marked a foundational shift in my soul. I wanted to feel sorry for myself. I wanted to mope in feeling unseen and misunderstood. Instead, what could have been a morose, lonely weekend bloomed into one of the most transformative times of self-reflection and sacred dialogue I’ve ever experienced.

I started to say that I took my hurts to God, but the truth is I chose to sit with them, feeling pity for myself, and my Heavenly Father reached out to me. And in the thick silence of that weekend, as I grieved over the story I couldn’t possibly have imagined for myself 20 years ago, I saw myself and my life journey with more clarity than ever.

The truths I realized that weekend are too revolutionary to keep to myself. I realize that the fact that it took me this long to see myself with this kind of God-gifted understanding surely means that there are others needing to hear these truths as well. So on the days that the weight of your hard story feels like it will crush you into oblivion, whisper these words to your beaten soul, scribble them in your journal, tuck them deep into the hollows of your heart, and remind yourself over and over again until you have the strength to believe it.

God chose to leave you in this broken world—to live, to love, to struggle—not as punishment, but with purpose. The hardship you face isn’t pointless; it’s the very tool he is using to shape something in you that comfort never could.

He is at work in your pain, not to crush you, but to change you—to rescue you from the parts of yourself that hold you back from life as he intended it. And because he loves you deeply, he is willing to let go of your temporary happiness if it means drawing you closer to lasting wholeness.

God is unwavering in this mission. He’s not distracted. He hasn’t forgotten you. He’s committed—to your transformation, to your redemption, and to your good, even when it hurts.