The Hard Good: Showing Up for God to Work in You When You Want to Shut DownSample

Welcoming Change

There are many things I miss about my dad. But life moves on. One of the hardest things I’ve found about losing someone who was integral in your life is that you have to replace the spot they filled for you with something else powerful. You don’t replace the person, but you replenish the emptiness. Change is attached to this loss of my dad. I’ve realized that one doesn’t come without the other. What I’ve also realized is that when the change is unwelcome, it is particularly difficult. Don’t get discouraged and quit. Stay in it and keep going. If we can get on the other side of change, we will love it. It’s just that darn getting there. 

Fighting change is what we often do, but almost always we are fighting what is best for us. Even if the initial hard thing (like a painful loss) isn’t the good thing, in and of itself, healing from it will require we change something in our mind or heart, undoubtedly, which will be for our best. Change is where we enjoy the benefits of breaking bad habits and finally living free. It’s where we get that new us we’ve always wanted. It’s where God is able to do that great work in us we have been anointed and appointed for all our lives. It’s where our hard days finally get to see their true worth. When it’s worth the sweat of the hard for the sweet of the good, that’s the hard good. 

I hope you’ve come to see that there’s an important why for holding this tension of the hard and the good. It isn’t just life. God has a special and specific purpose in asking you to go down the challenging road. He wants to do His greatest work in you. This will require you to get uncomfortable at times. I hope I’ve shown you that He will be with you all the way. If we allow Him, He will be in the center, helping it work together, even when our plans don’t work out. Holding us together. Building us better, brick by brick. This is earth life, and He told us it would be so. Anything hard you face, God wants to use to bring you personal joy and make you most usable for Him.

Only God’s perspective makes our hard also good at the same time. In the latter days of my daddy’s life, he would often say, “I am happy.” This made no literal sense. The man couldn’t walk. He couldn’t comb his own hair. He could get out very few words. Yet the wild man of his youth had been tamed. His restless heart was settled. That’s where his happiness came from. This is what it looks like when Jesus does His greatest work in us. We change. We grow. We crave the way of Christ. His good begins to feel good to us. God’s gifts can be wrapped in change. That change can be hard, but they are still gifts.

Respond

How do you respond when you are confronted with the need to make a change—especially if it is unwanted?

How has your perspective on the tension between hard and good aligned with God’s? 

What change is God asking you to embrace? How can making it to the other side of change bring you joy?