When The Going Gets Tough By Chardonnay Beaver

“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” C.S. Lewis

By Chardonnay Beaver

I never was the child who enjoyed watching my classmates get into altercations. Watching people suffer, or cause suffering, doesn’t enthuse me.

Until I found myself in a wrestling match.

I wasn’t fighting against a particular person or authority, rather with life and self. This is the most common, yet silent, altercation.

Daily people wrestle with their thoughts, their past, their present, their circumstances, their failures, and their future. We wrestle and tussle and hustle until we can’t no longer. After going down the laundry list of self-imposed expectations we find ourselves feeling defeated.

News flash: life is not something we can fight against. Life is what we fight for.

A critical aspect of life is hardship.

Many of us were served a hearty scoop of hardship, often unbearable to process. Hardship comes in all shapes and sizes. It has no regard for race, income, gender, nationality, or education. Life escorts hardship into our circumstances while our dreams are begging to join the party.

Life welcomes hardship because hardship is necessary. Without hardship there is no balance. Without hardship character isn’t developed. Without hardship we’re prematurely thrusted into the spotlight destined to compromise.

Hardship is necessary.

Words of Wisdom by Char of the week: Rather than people on your theoretical boxing gloves, or checking your calendar, develop your faith. Learn from hardship. Sit in it and process. Hardship may come like a storm, but it's lessons are as valuable as success. So rejoice because you're overcoming more than you thought you could. The very thing you’re involuntarily enduring is equipping you for your destiny. Philippians 1:6