accept hard things

Making sense of Hard times

Some moments stick to your soul.

It’s when you get the “before” and “after” sensation. Sometimes you recognize it in the moment. You drop a road marker and think, I need to come back and think about this later. Other times you recognize its significance as you glance in the rearview mirror.

These moments often shift our worldview. They can come cloaked in a diagnosis, a failure, or an accident. It might be a time when we wished we said or did something differently. Maybe we spoke too fast or stayed silent too long.

An Invitation to Allow Your Weary Soul to Rejoice

Soul Weariness is present in epidemic proportions this month.

As the year skids to a halt, you might just be feeling out of touch with your soul, as if it were still lingering in November. Busy often overtakes us in the last few weeks of the year. Instead of slowing down, we add more to our daily to-do list to ensure that everyone around us has a Merry Christmas. This is a laudable cause, yet if we fail to pause and recognize the weariness in our own soul, we risk limping into the new year rather than approaching it with peace and purpose.

For so many of us, December conjures difficult emotions and it can be tempting to remain busy dreading what we might feel if we slow down long enough to sit still for more than 30 seconds. If you are nodding your head right now, give yourself a hug and smile, you have made it this far in the year. Hope is still here, you just may have to look a little harder to find it in this season of hard.

Others of us are coming off of a year that has brought joy and unexpected blessings. If that has been your experience of the year, it might be tempting to put your head down and work even harder to insure that you can duplicate your past successes. I welcome you to these few minutes of slowing down as well.

Whatever you have experienced this past year, finding hope in all things allows your soul space to breathe and strength to face tomorrow with courage.

In both the good and the difficult, we can be tempted to forget our role as hope finders. We muscle through so much, white-knuckling it through life unaware that striving is the basis of our internal disposition. Exhausted in mind, body, and spirit, we might even lose touch with our capacity to recognize God’s daily gift of hope. A prayerful pause in an invitation for our soul to tell us what it needs. This pause also allows us to recognize the souls we encounter.

For so much of my life, I wanted to stay on an even keel. Don’t rejoice too much in the good times, lest the joy evaporate. Don’t allow myself to feel too much in the difficult. lest the hard times never leave. Subconsciously, I lived as if what I allowed myself to feel could control what happened in my life.

In this past year of writing Abide and Arise, I have become more aware of my own white-knuckle tendencies. Please tell me I am not alone.

For years I have read about the benefits of counting my blessings. I have read the books, tried to journal, I even added my thanks to the jar. Each time my hunt for the happy ended after a few days. In hindsight, my progress in sustained gratitude was halted because I was focused on wrestling my emotions into submission so I could get back to balance rather than becoming more aware of the status of my soul. Without a plan and proper motivation, my good intentions fail to keep me motivated.

Several times, friends told me what a difference gratitude made for them. Knowing the hard in one of my friend’s life yet seeing the joy she radiates made me rethink how I was approaching gratitude.

Wanting to share more of what my friend’s soul radiated, I created weekly gratitude prompts for Arise. To create and test them, I would spend the week pondering the prompt. Unaware at the time, I started mining my life for hope. I looked back on the difficult times and pondered what I learned that brought me to this point in my life. I hunted for joy in the nooks and crannies of the day and allowed myself to embrace it fully trusting that there would be more tomorrow. I no longer needed to hoard or resist certain experiences or emotions.

The hope that accompanies recognizing God’s hand in the struggle and the triumph has remained with me even after I hit the publish button.

It is my prayer that the same hope I discovered permeates your soul and carries you through this season, no matter what you are facing. God is good and His love is unfailing. He remains present in all things. As hope hunters, we can be on the lookout for His loving presence and point it out to others who are struggling to find it for themselves.

Do you have a gratitude practice? If so, I would love to hear more about it. You can comment below or tag me on social and let me know where you are finding hope.