How To Move Through Suffering And Come Back StrongerSample

Donna Gibbs: How to Move Through Suffering and Come Back Stronger Devotional Day 2

“Why?”

Scripture: James 1:2-3

“Why?”

I hear this short but powerful question from my clients every day. They have experienced a depth of loss that cannot be calculated. They feel they are living outside themselves, looking at the unthinkable. On the good days, they go through the motions. On the bad days, they cannot function at all.

If you are suffering, you know what I am talking about. Perhaps you are asking this question right now. Perhaps you are facing the biggest mountain of your life. You have been given a hardship you don’t think you can survive. You want to bounce back, but sometimes just getting out of bed is a task.

If you are suffering today, all too aware of your weakness, you can learn to suffer well. You don’t have to be a slave to struggles. In fact, you can learn healthy coping skills that will propel you to bounce back and even help you thrive. Asking “Why?” creates an empty cycle of frustration. “Why?” is the wrong question altogether and has possibly even lured you deeper into this pit you are screaming to exit. 

So rather than wasting time exploring why we are suffering, we need to discover how to survive—and how to survive well. Sometimes our struggles, our victimization, and our suffering become the most familiar components of our lives. Depression, shame, anxiety, bitterness, grief, sickness, and addiction become weirdly comfortable and predictable after a period of time. So much so that we have a hard time imagining life without pain. We even become afraid of life without struggle.

Maybe pain has become a part of your routine, your explanation for inadequacies. It consumes your time and attention, even your identity. You may be afraid of resilience. You may be afraid of bouncing back. You may wonder, Who will I be without the struggle? What will others expect of me? What is my purpose, apart from pain? 

But you can bounce back. It starts with changing the way you think and adopting healthy skills that will transform the way you suffer.

What does the word resilience mean to you? In what ways might you be keeping yourself “stuck” in your suffering?