Quotes About Struggle

The enemy loves to take our rejection and twist it into a raw, irrational fear that God really doesn't have a good plan for us.

wisdom like none other can arise from those hard places that bring us low.

And that's when I just want to lie down on the floor in a very dramatic way and loudly declare, "BUT I AM NOT JESUS!!" Ugh. However, as hard as this seems, I think it's harder to keep letting circumstances and complicated people kidnap my peace.

Pain is the sensation that indicates a transformation is needed.

You will hear human answers that try to tie bows around the big blows of life. These sound good in a sermon but never hold up in real life. And that's when you will see what a gift it is that you've been entrusted with enough hurt to keep you humane. You'll offer the only real answer available: 'The Lord helped me survive and He'll help you too. I'll hold your hand while you find your way to Him.

felt stuck with a suffocating sense of wanting to feel better but not knowing how. My brain has such a hard time overriding my heart sometimes. One rejection after another did quite a number on my heart. And each new rejection didn't just add hurt; it multiplied the pain that was already there. That accumulation created a dark feeling of hopeless defeat.

The space between our expectations and our reality is a fertile field, and it's the perfect place to grow a bumper crop of disappointment.

I don't know what to say or how to say it." So I said nothing. Not a word. I stuffed it all down and started to build a barrier to hide behind. After the incident, I smiled when I saw her, but I held her at a distance. She knew something was wrong, but when she questioned me about it, I lied. "Everything's fine," I said. But everything wasn't fine. Not at all.

I used my cravings for food as a prompting to pray. It was my way of tearing down the tower of impossibility before me and building something new. My tower of impossibility was food. Brick by brick, I imagined myself dismantling the food tower and using those same bricks to build a walkway of prayer, paving the way to victory.

Yes, faith still moves mountains. But sometimes the greater act of faith is not praying for the mountain to move instantly but rather hanging in there while God helps you to move it bit by bit.

And the gaping hole left behind is in some ways worse than death. If their absence was caused by death, you would grieve their loss. But when their absence is caused by rejection, you not only grieve their loss but you also have to wrestle through the fact that they wanted this.

The Devil is powerful, but he's also predictable. We are told in 1 John 2:16 the exact three ways he's going to come after us. "For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father, but from the world.

All I have to do is stand at the gravesite of my sister who died way too young and in way too much pain to be reminded that none of this is easy or tidy. Some things won't be fixed on this side of eternity; they just have to be walked through.

It's tough being a sold-out soul for Christ stuck in a body that's so tempted to sin. That's why it's essential that I view my time with God each morning as a preparation and an invitation.

I've realized this isn't as much about losing the weight as it is gaining truth—the truth of who I am in Christ and how I am made for more than this constant, self-defeating struggle. It's the truth that reminds me a scale can measure my physical body but never my worth as a woman. And it's the truth that God loves me the way I am, but He loves me too much to leave me stuck in a place of defeat.

I tried to prop up what was left of me so I wouldn't collapse into the broken place inside. Good grades. Achievements and accolades. Fun friends and good times. Boys who made me feel special. I tried to steady myself with anything that helped me feel better.

This isn't an indication that your healing isn't working. It's just an indication that you're a human still holding on to some hurt that needs to be resolved.

Hurting but still hoping—that is the human journey.

A heaviness settled in that I couldn't explain or pinpoint exactly. I'm not sure how to properly describe it, except to say on different days it crept up with varying personas that seemed to hold me together and rip me apart simultaneously. Cynicism dressed like a security guard, making me believe that if I hoped for less, it would protect me and prevent more pain. In reality, though, it was a thief in disguise, out to steal every bit of closeness between me and those I love.

But lying in the critical care unit—an abdomen distending more and more with each passing hour, tubes running in and out of a body refusing to function, and a pain pump set to deliver the highest doses but still not relieving the pain—will make death look quite appealing.

Today's rejections, big or subtle, are like stealth bombs that zing straight to my core, locating hurts from my past and making them agonizingly present all over again.

This went beyond just rejection from man. That is hard. But what's downright horrible is when God seems to just silently stand by, withholding answers and solutions for which you've cried out. That deep hurt can make you question His goodness.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

Sometimes, though, when God calls us to be set apart for another purpose, it's difficult to believe God's goodness in the hurt.