Resiliency

Why the hard seasons are the best seasons and how they bring our past hard seasons into easy focus.

Being a human is an incredible thing. Profound, right? Ha! Stick with me. I’ve recently been thinking about all the things I used to think were so hard and now I find so easy. Or if not easy, at least not wholly crushing.

Things like this season of life I’m in. Ten years ago, parenting seemed so very hard. I only had four kiddos back then and they were 6, 4, 3 and 1. My hands were busy helping kids who couldn’t help themselves. Who didn’t take care of their personal hygiene, meals, or homework without my constant oversight or assistance. Who couldn’t even get into the car without my aid. Life was hard back then.

But now? With daughters who are almost 17 and 15? Sons who are 13, 11, and 7? Three dogs, a jampacked schedule where we literally have something—or multiple somethings—every day of the week? Yeah, it’s a whole heck of a lot harder now. My hands might be emptier, and my kids are thankfully much more independent, but the problems are much bigger, the stakes are much, much higher, and I’m suddenly not just raising kids, I’m preparing to launch them into adulthood.

They can brush their teeth without being reminded and manage to work their own car buckles. But we’re talking big relationship problems/solutions. We’re navigating narrowing down colleges. I’ve handed over the keys to a precious baby and I’m about to equip her sister with the same skill.  

Same with my career. Ten years ago, this writing gig was self-sustaining. I killed myself to finish books in the wee hours of the night. I wrote at naptime and bedtime and lunchtime. I wrote in the car, at dance practice, before doctor’s appointments. And beyond the physical act of writing, I was weighed down with imposter syndrome, high anxiety, and the devastation of facing negative reviews. Younger, greener, and untested, life as an author was truly hard.

But now? Working a full-time 40 hour/week job, having faced the absolute worst of my fears and watched them all come true, true busyness hampering every moment of well-intentioned writing? Now, it’s really hard. Harder than I could have ever imagined. Harder than I ever wanted to face.

The list goes on. I used to think being a work-from-home mom was hard. But a real working mom? The kind who actually leaves the house and misses the morning rush and the field trips and the housework? Yeah, I had no idea.

How about marriage. Because in those early years of the honeymoon stage this whole communication/selflessness/serving each other thing was hard too. But now??? With five opinionated kids and a demanding schedule and three full-time jobs between us and almost 20 years of marriage—now the real work begins, the hard work of tilling this marital soil so that when these babes finally leave the nest, we still want to stay.

I was sharing my heart about this with a close friend last week. I said, I used to think staying home was so hard and now I realize how good I had it. Instead of chastising me for my lack of gratitude, she said something that changed my whole perspective. “Doesn’t that show you just how resilient humans are?”

The thought was a beautiful moment of clarity. It wasn’t that the things I was doing before were necessarily easy and I was just a lazy, ungrateful bum who couldn’t see how good I had it at the time. It was that those things really were hard. They were so hard. They were crushing and bulldozing and bone-deep exhausting.

But then I grew, and matured, and adjusted. And stepped into harder things. Instead of crumbling beneath the weight of these new levels of hard, I put the muscles I’d trained and toned and readied to the work they were prepared to do. Yes, there was still more training, more toning, more stretching to come. But without those hard-won muscles to begin with, I would have been flattened completely. (Think cartoon version of a clueless, unsuspecting someone getting smashed beneath a piano.)

The human capacity to handle hard circumstances is truly amazing. We can do so much. Be so much. Accomplish so much. But often, the hard work that goes into each hard season scares us away.

We don’t naturally reach for hard things. We shrink back and settle into the path of least resistance instead. The pain of these growing moments makes us flinch, cry out, choose a different, easier, less exhausting life. We don’t want to become something better. We want to become something more comfortable.

And yet, instead of truly finding rest and ease like we hope, life has a way of teaching us lessons we don’t want to learn. When we avoid hard things, everything becomes hard. When we resist change and growth and circumstantial maturity, we also resist the tools we need to even survive simple tasks and mild obstacles. Our mental atrophy continues to sabotage, obstruct, and wound. By not choosing the hard path, we make every path harder.

So onward we go, letting the hard seasons wash over us, submerge us completely. We choose hard because we know harder is in our future and we want to keep surviving. Maybe even thriving through it all. The storm of life doesn’t pass over us. Instead, it relentlessly becomes a tougher, more dangerous storm. They gather other storms and become super storms. Maybe there are days, even seasons, where the sun is out, and the temperature is mild. But those are beautiful blips between hurricanes. Not the normal forecast.

Not to say that life isn’t still beautiful. There is a bone-shaking awe as we watch lightning streak across the sky. My heart sings as thunder rumbles the ground beneath my feet. Gloomy days are my favorite days. There is fear and there is pain and there is also so much wonder I could weep with it.

And it is those stormy seasons that make us truly appreciate the best parts of life. In fact, they make life more real. More worth living. More wonderful.

I could never be grateful for those before seasons unless I had this new hard season to put them into perspective. I could never have found this well of gratitude for the early years, the at-home years, the writing-full-time years without this new level of struggle and change. I get to be grateful today because of the sacrifices I made before.

Which is how I know these hard years will give way to sweet memory too. They are building me up for whatever is to come. They are showing me what my body and mind and heart are capable of. They are growing me. Stretching me. Pushing me to reach new heights—both of accomplishment and of gratitude.

These are the hard days we are blessed to toil with. The struggles that will one day be oh so easy. The heart work that will give way to precious blessings and a cache of useful skills. These hard seasons will one day be the foundation for whatever comes next. And so, we press on because we know how resilient these human bodies and minds and lives of ours are.