Hard Is Good
Four months before a category five hurricane destroyed our home, I was at a homeschool conference where I heard three small words that indelibly impacted my life: hard is good.
These words were timely for me.
We had just moved. It would be my first year homeschooling the twins in addition to the Bigs (faint hysterical laughter), and our youngest was still nursing and in diapers. My husband had taken on a challenging job. And I was dealing with my first round of vitamin D deficiency, which left me napping in the trunk of the car while unloading groceries. Nothing says “I just moved to the sunshine state” quite so ironically as a vitamin D deficiency.
“Hard is good” resonated with me. As a runner, I knew that while the easy runs were more fun, the hard ones were the ones I needed. As a teacher, I had first hand evidence that if I didn’t give my students challenging material, they would stagnate. And as a mom, I was in the front row as a witness to the truth that growing up is hard to do…but not growing up is far worse.
I knew those words—“hard is good”—were words I needed. I needed to remember that when things get tough, that’s when we grow. And even more importantly, that when things get tough we learn to lean into Jesus more and more, allowing His strength to trump our weakness, His joy to conquer our frustration, His purposes to shape our days. I didn’t realize how many times over the following months and years those words would return to my heart.
Four months after I first internalized the words “hard is good,” I had the opportunity to put my money where my mouth was.
As I waited for hours while the news trickled in from a storm devastated Panama City to find out if my husband had survived along with the rest of the ride out team.
As we dug through mold slicked belongings, trying to discover what was salvageable.
As we moved our family of seven (plus three pets) into an RV surrounded by broken trees and a grieving community.
In all those moments (and so many more), I had the opportunity to decide if I was going to act on my belief that hard was good. And it was. Those three small words so helped shape my perspective that when I look back on that time, I see how blessed we were by those around us, by the opportunities we were given, by the growth we experienced as a family.
Yesterday, I sat down at my kitchen table with the five kids I’ll have in my seventh grade class next year. I’d asked them to join me and their moms just for the beginning of our planning meeting (yes, homeschool moms start planning for August back in April) because I wanted them to have a voice in some of the decisions we were about to make, but mostly because I wanted to encourage them about what was coming.
The curriculum they are tackling next year is hard. They know it, their parents know it, and I know it. It is designed to push them. And I shared those three words with them: hard is good. And I asked them to think of some hard things they had survived. And then I told them that the very fact that they were sitting at my table meant that they had survived those hard things…and that they would survive my class too.
Next year, some of these kids—hopefully all of them—are going to fail at one point or another. Why do I say “hopefully all of them”? Because when they fail in a safe environment, they have the opportunity to learn how to deal with that failure in a healthy way. They have the opportunity to learn how to pick themselves up, reassess, try again. They have the opportunity to see that the challenges they thought were going to break them have the opportunity to make them stronger, smarter, kinder, wiser, more resilient.
They have the opportunity to learn for themselves at a young age that hard can be good. And that is an incredible gift because later in life when challenging circumstances come their way—as they inevitably will—they won’t sit back and moan “Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why is God so mean?” No, they’ll remember that hard is good—and then try to figure out how that can be so.
They will look for those who are helping them. They will look for what is working. They will look for what can be done differently. They will look to see how they are growing. They will look for the cracks in the pavement where a tiny flower is growing, and they will learn (and relearn and relearn yet again) that just because things are hard doesn’t necessarily mean that they are bad.
Yes, hard can be absolutely the worst. Hard doesn’t feel good. We want out. We want it to be over. We don’t like it. No one asks for their home to be destroyed or their marriage broken or their child lost or their job terminated. My seventh grade class won’t want to learn how to parse Latin verbs and draw the shoreline of China and dissect a sheep’s eyeball.
But hard can also be growth. It can be new skills, new strength, new understanding. Hard can be a deepening of our friendships due to necessary vulnerability. It can be an opportunity for us to draw near to God and let Him draw near to us. It can be learning for ourselves that when God says He works all things together for our good, He means it. Hard can be learning how to hope in new ways, learning how to trust, learning to find the end of ourselves and the beginning of an infinite God.
Hard can be good—unexpectedly, unbelievably, incredibly good—but only if we let it.
