When Life is Hard

I appreciate Glenna Marshall’s advice: “When Life is Hard, Keep Reading Your Bible.” She urges us not to stew in our sadness, turning inward, analyzing the feelings, attempting to fix them. Instead, she calls us to look beyond ourselves, to God’s word.

Fascinatingly, God’s word might not even have the exact answer to “fix” life’s current hardness.

We often feel the need to dissect our sadness, to turn it inside out in an effort to understand it. We believe that if we can just understand it, we could fix it. But life isn’t always so easily fixed. Brokenness is rarely quickly mended. Suffering is often long and draining. It’s not wrong to seek to understand our sorrows, but sometimes what we need is to turn our gaze outward. We need to look to something solid and unchanging. Someone solid and unchanging

Marshall demonstrates the value of seeking the Lord through his word, which puts all the hard things into perspective, even if they’re not fixed.

She talks about finding companionship and guidance. One thing I would add is that the Scriptures also give us the vocabulary to lament the hard times. The Lord has entered into our suffering, and he gives us words to help us process it with him.

So along with Glenna, I urge you: Don’t approach the hard times as times to pull yourself away from God and his word. Run toward him to find resources to help you through.