When Life Crushes Your Spirit

Every so often, no matter who you are or where you live, how much faith you have or what you drive, trouble comes right to your house. It meets you at the door. It tests you in ways you can't always control or correct, and you have to persevere. Talking about crushing and endearing seems like an oxymoron because who can stand being crushed?

But we do it every day. We are crushed in ways that people cannot see. I warn you that recovery has pain. We all know that injury causes pain, but so does recovery. If you're going to be healed, you have to endure the pain and crush the idea that life does not stop to accommodate your comfort, their situations and demands will not stop just because you are in a bad situation or at a bad time.

In some kind of way, every now and then, you have to press above the pain and keep moving, and we must realise it's the ending that matters. God's thoughts toward us are so good that we might have an expected end, but he didn't say anything about the middle. And so, as we endure the pain and go through the agony, agony like being misunderstood, agony of not feeling loved, agony of being underemployed or unemployed, agony of losing a job or a spouse or a loved one, I mean real agony.

I'm not talking about you losing your parking space, I'm talking about real agony. That tries your soul. That pushes you to the breaking point where you feel like you're going to bleed through your skin. You have to know that. That doesn't mean you're not getting better. Recovery hurts too; it involves confronting old issues and digging out old wounds. That's difficult to talk about, but if we don't get to the root of it, we'll never be well.

Sometimes God allows us to have surgery, and the recovery period may be lengthy, but that does not mean we are not improving. What it does mean is that if you commit to going through the process, you must be prepared to endure the pain because pain is a part of the process, and today if you are suffering and in agony and in turmoil and feeling disconnected from the world and like life is passing you by while you wrestle with and gruffle with life's atrocities and vicissitudes.

I want you to know that tomorrow is coming and if you can endure this moment and withstand this agony, if you can endure the darkness of the night, it can be a long night, but I've never seen a night so long that it didn't eventually give way to the morning.