Don’t Let the Hard Days Win
Try your best.
Give it your all.
Hone your craft.
Study and grow.
Practice and plan.
Pour your guts into it.
Life still sends days that knock you on your back and spit on your soul.
These are not your average challenging days. These are the chilling ones. The days that stomp your confidence and salt your wounds. The days that look at you and ask, “who are you?” And you have no answer.
“You don’t really know Jesus is all you need, until Jesus is all you have.”
On days like these it’s not just the pain you feel, it’s the disillusionment. All your work, your effort, your grinding, your praying … you swore you saw progress. Fruit! Then a hard day leaves you swearing the progress must be an illusion. The fruit, false. Me? Fake.
This often comes in the form of an attack on things we’ve let become too vital or too threatening to our sense of self:
A core competency: something you think yourself good at. A gift or talent or success story you take pride in and, whether you realize it or not, attach self-worth to.
A core vulnerability: An old hurt. A throbbing doubt. A hidden insecurity — things you swore you’d moved on from, or at the very least gotten better at carrying.
A core assumption: something you rely on without thinking twice. Stable income. An important person. A sure plan. Even a theology – a way you assume God always works as long as you do your part.
Then something happens.
You have a bad outing. A cringe-inducing failure. You hit a plateau. Something stable changes. Someone important leaves. A decision doesn’t pan out. A wound opens. An insecurity is exposed. Ruin seems close.
And God doesn’t do what He’s done before – what you assumed he would do if you just did your part.
Fear and doubt rush to the surface. You feel average. Small. Abandoned. Or worse.
In your pain, you begin lobbing God a barrage of questions:
God, am I good for anything?
Are you doing anything?
Why are you letting me fail?
Why aren’t you helping me?
What’s the point of following you if this is where it leads?
And God is silent. Not because he doesn’t hear you, but because He never answers these kinds of questions – the pain-reducing kind.
In your crisis, He sees a deep and needed work beginning to happen. A chiseling, a dying. You are on a cross. And the Father knows answering your questions will not help. Divine explanations will only offer you what the Roman soldiers offered his Son while on his own cross: a wine to dull the experience. Only, unlike his Son, you would certainly take it – you would take anything to escape the pain. But escaping important pain never heals you.
So, the Father listens and doesn’t answer. He never uses his voice to dull good pain. In this moment, His silence is all he will share with you. It is the only form of his presence that won’t distract you from your cross.
He knows you will protest.
You will hate and beg and plead that he intoxicate you with comfort.
He also knows you will learn much if you remain sober:
1. You will learn how to wait. The saints who’ve come before you had to wait on God through formidable suffering – so must you. The most formidable things are the most formative. Thus, though the details of your personal story will differ, you will experience the same overarching plotline all God’s children have through the ages — from Job to Joseph to Jesus himself. You are not exempt from the broken world they endured, the enemy they faced, or the sometimes-surprising ways a sovereign God moves his good works forward. You will sleep in David’s cave. Sit in Joseph’s cell. Cry in Job’s sackcloth. In these places, you will learn to trust him as they did: with nothing more than the knowledge of his character and the breath of his life in your lungs.
2. You will learn how to be spiritually poor. Hard days strip you of everything you think you’ve got going for you. They create “me & nothing else” moments. Unpleasant as they are, these moments are doorways to rare intimacy and even rarer revelation. Most days, you approach God like Abel—with something to offer him you’re proud of. But hard days empty your hands. They force your ego to wrestle with grace—and lose. “Can I accept a love that accepts me when I have nothing to give?”
Only broken people on crosses ever learn how to answer, yes.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Thus, your hard days become trials-with-benefits. They are crosses, and classrooms. They are places of pain, and places where you discover God’s not-yet-seen graces. Only in the desert will you eat manna. Only in the wilderness will you drink water from rock. Only with Pharaoh’s whip at your back will you find a sea parted.
God allows hard days, and even seasons full of them, knowing they show you things and shape you in ways happy days never could. You have heard your Father’s voice in beauty. You must now hear his silence in agony. And come to recognize that they are both his love. They are both his grace attending to your soul as a sculptor to his rock – chiseling, breaking, subtracting to create art.
On these days, your job is not to work – you are the work.
Pain and disillusionment, sovereignly allowed, is evidence of the Trinity administering a good, necessary, deep work. The Father is making you more like the Son. The Son is pleading your case and washing your feet. The Spirit is sustaining as you fire question after question into the dark sky above your cross.
In it all, God is carrying you beyond adolescent faith — beyond a faith that floats from encounter to encounter, dining hungrily on rewards and reassurance and good reports. He is forming in you a faith that can eat tears and live, hear silence and believe, and cherish crosses for no other reason than how similar to Christ your story becomes when you are on one.
What is the good of it?
Such a faith is the only kind that lasts. Such faith will see scars become songs. Such faith will be broken enough by the cave to not need the throne when it comes.
Are you on a cross?
Ask God your questions – this is catharsis for your soul.
But do not ask your Father to bring you down. Ask him to keep you lifted up as long as it takes for the work to finish. Then spread your arms, hang and breathe until it is over. On the other side, you will have become someone no accomplishment could have made you. A person formidably formed, carried by a peace no answer could have given, aglow with the life of God one only finds inside a tomb.
The days you don’t want are the days you can’t become like Christ without. So when they come, don’t let the hard days win — just let them work.
“For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.
So then, death is at work in us.. ”
