There are some weeks when I wish the assignment were something easier. Something that looked more like beauty and less like breaking. You would think that I would know these things by now, at my age, but He is so kind to gently remind me, again and again. I keep coming back to this quiet conviction: sometimes the hard things are the assignment.
Not to fix them. Not to push through them with gritted teeth and a list of coping strategies--and trust me, I try to conjure them. But to bear them well.
To carry them with a kind of faith that doesn’t try to edit or escape what’s coming undone.
To sit inside the difficulty and say, “Even here, I will trust.”
That’s the part I forget when I’m in the middle of it all—when the weight feels too much and I wonder what I did wrong to land here. But maybe the truth is gentler than I think. Maybe the hardship isn’t punishment or failure or some detour away from purpose. Maybe it is the work. The deeper formation. The tender undoing that saves me from myself.
Slowing down in the midst of it doesn’t feel productive. But maybe that's the point. Maybe it's not about getting through the hard thing faster. Maybe it's about becoming someone softer, truer, more rooted within it.
There is no clarity in the thick of it—just glimpses. A Scripture verse that hems me in at just the right time, a moment of quiet in the kitchen, a tear-filled prayer at the blank canvas that finally admits, “I can’t do this alone.”
I don’t always see it now. But I believe one day I will. When I get there, it won't even matter then.
In the meantime, I’ll keep showing up. Doing the next right thing.
Not to fix.
Not to force.
Just to be—faithful in the middle, even when it doesn’t make sense.
That is enough for today.
Maybe that’s the real assignment after all.
