Everyone goes through difficult and sometimes painful times in life.  No one is exempt.  It’s the nature of being human.

It took me a while to realize that these hardships are not difficulties to be avoided at all costs, but transformative experiences to embrace as gifts.

The Gift Of Suffering And Hardship

It’s life’s challenges that develop our full potential if we allow it. Suffering expands, enlarges and refines us so that our capacity for love, grace and mercy go so much deeper and wider.  Our influence is more whole.

In Luke 22: 31-32 Jesus says to Peter, “Simon, Satan has asked to have all of you, to sift you like wheat.  But I have pleaded in prayer for you, Simon, that your faith should not fail.  So when you have repented and turned to me again, strengthen and build up your brothers.”

It’s after Peter suffers that he is then ready to help and build others up.  In the Gospels, this appears to be the only requirement for being used and sent out. He becomes the wounded healer and is ordained for ministry, if you will.  Leaning in to the pain and suffering  that comes our way  is often the best preparation to be useful to others.

And when you can be healed yourself and not just talk about healing, you are, as Henri Nouwen so well said, a “wounded healer.” Which is the only kind of healer, the only way to authentically be of help to others in this world.

What Is Suffering?

Challenges and hardships come packaged differently for different people.  What is a hardship for me may not be for you.  It’s not about the event itself, but about the experience of it that constitutes suffering and hardship.  How do you know if you are suffering?  Here are some feeling you may experience as indicators:

• loss and or grief
• misunderstood
• betrayal
• devalued or rejected
• alone and isolated

Embracing these times as a gift is the only way forward, really. Resisting and fighting it only prolongs things.  Or, as can happen, the hardships can make us bitter, not better.

How Do We Embrace Times of Hardship and Challenge?

1. Find  a trusted friend to talk with who has also walked through a difficult season of life.
2. Get a life coach or counselor if possible to hep you make sense of things and to discover the way forward.
3. Recognize that God still has a good plan and purpose for your life.  It’s not over.  It’s just over as you’ve known it.  There is hope for a better future on the other side of the hardship.
4. Journal like crazy.  Even if you haven’t had a personal journal, now is a good time to start.  Writing is part of the transformative process and later you’ll be glad to have recorded thoughts and feelings that are often only revealed during times of hardship and challenge.

You Are The Wounded Healer

Chances are you have been transformed through challenges and difficulties of some kind. Don’t wait for the pastor, priest, reverend or whoever to do the work of the ministry.  You are ordained through suffering, you are the wounded healer, which is the best kind.  You are more ready than ever to serve the world and those around you.

And, let me just add, you don’t have to be an adult to have experienced suffering.  A divorce, long-term childhood illness, an early death of a parent or close grandparent, can trigger the experience of suffering even in children.  I’ve seen children, adolescents, and teens who have themselves gone through suffering and have intuitively allowed it to make them better.

So rather than wishing we looked more like we have it all together, or that the hard times would never have happened, instead, may we allow ourselves to be changed and transformed into the wideness, vastness, and beauty of God’s love.

 

Yahweh rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eye.  Psalm 18:19, The Message

Photo by Dikaseva on Unsplash