How To Grow UpSample

Life is hard, but God is still good. 

Sometimes, maturity isn’t something you decide. Sometimes, life forces you into maturity. And it’s not always fun or pretty. We’re not sugarcoating it. Life can be really hard sometimes. And when we go through those hard times, we have a choice about whether we will just go through it or grow through it. 

We all have to go through hard things. Jesus promised us in John 16:33 that in this world, we will face trouble. You know this. Maybe your parents have gotten a divorce, or you’ve lost a loved one, or a pet passed away, or you moved to a new school and don’t have any new friends yet. But, Jesus also promised we could still have hope in those hard times because He has already won. 

When we follow Jesus, we have the hope of Heaven when life on earth hurts really badly. And we know that in the end, God will make every wrong thing right again. But in the meantime? It hurts. But Jesus promises to be with us in the middle of those hurts. 

Jesus actually had a brother named James. Crazy, right? But James wrote a book in the Bible, and he talked a lot about hard times. In today’s verses, James writes that we can actually rejoice during hard times. Not because things are going our way, but because we know God is still here for us. And in the moments when life gets hard, we can mature. We can learn. We can grow.

Jesus doesn’t cause bad things to happen to us. But He does use those bad things for good—if we’ll let Him. If we keep praying even when we don’t understand what God’s doing, we’ll find peace. If we keep reading the Bible when it doesn’t seem to be helping, we’ll find truth that helps us keep going. If we keep trusting in God when life is hard, we’ll realize that even though life is hard, God is still good. 

It doesn’t happen overnight. But God can handle your doubts. He can handle it when you’re mad or frustrated with Him. But He wants you to keep talking to Him because then He can help you grow through your troubles. 

Maturity means growing through hard times. It’s not always fun, but it is always worth it. Just as a sculpture has to be chipped away to turn into something beautiful, we go through hard times that hurt but help make us better. Because when we face hard things, we can grow closer to God, and He can help us learn from those hard things so that we can help others.