We all have our "hard". The thorn in our side. It may be a person in our family who drives us around the twist, but we cannot avoid them because they are part of the family. It may be a chronic illness, limiting our mobility, giving us pain, stopping us from doing the things we most love with the people we most love. It may be a child from whom we are estranged, and long to be reconciled with.
Some people like complaining about their hard. A lot! Some people allow themselves to be defined by their hard. Others are able to keep it in perspective. Even the most positive people have a hard of some sort.
I've been following a blog by Kara Tippetts called Mundane Faithfulness
(http://www.mundanefaithfulness.com/). This blog is about Kara's hard, but also about being in community with others and allowing them to share in your hard, and serving you in it. It's about lots of things. I discovered Kara and her story via another blog that I follow called A Holy Experience (http://www.aholyexperience.com/) Both of these blogs have some gems of encouragement. Kara calls her cancer her hard. And various aspects of it "today's hard", or "the new hard". While I cannot imagine living with Kara's hard, we all have a hard. Some of us more than one. The hard may change over the years. A couple of years ago, the death of my third born was my hard. Before that it was something else. In the last few months, the death of Sophie has become integrated into who I am. It's no longer front and centre. Some days I don't even think about her. That hard has been replaced by another. Maybe that hard was there all along, and it was simply eclipsed by the Sophie hard for a time.
In the early weeks after Sophie's death, I read one particular book over and over again. It's called " A grace disguised - how the soul grows through loss" by Jerry Sittser. (find more info about his book here) What Jerry wrote about catastrophic loss made such sense to me in those early days. He pointed out that it was not very helpful to compare one person's loss with another, since all loss is catastrophic to the person who is experiencing it. I don't know if one person's hard is more difficult than another. They are all hard. Many people in my community are experiencing hards at the moment. Terminal cancer. Divorce. Miscarriage. Children and grandchildren moving far away. A child with a brain tumor. Chronic debilitating back pain. Our hearts ache for these pains, whether they are felt by ourselves, or by a family member or friend.
Sometimes in order to try to make ourselves or someone else feel better, we are tempted to compare their troubles to something in the news of late, such as well at least you aren't in Nepal, or on that boat, or getting shot in "insert country here". I know that the intention behind these comments are good, but they aren't actually helpful, are they. If our basic human needs of food/shelter/love and belonging are not currently being met, I'm sure all the other needs would vanish into insignificance as we battled for survival. But once our survival needs are met, does it mean that life is easy, and no more pain will ever be experienced? Nope.
It's my understanding from the bible and from my own life experience that the soul does indeed grow through loss, as Jerry Sittser describes. I believe that one of the reasons God allows suffering in our lives because it will produce changes in us that no other process will. And of course if we had a choice, that fork in the road where one side was bliss, happy life, and the other was suffering and hard times, do you think we would willingly choose the suffering? Heck, no.
Loss can unite communities. It can lead to forgiveness where previously there was none. It can lead to loving others in a better way, in the way which they need to be loved, rather than just the way that we feel like giving. Bizarrely, loss can lead to wholeness. A knowledge of how utterly dependent we are, as human creatures, on God the Father, for every breath we take.
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