Pain to steward

Some days, I catch myself wondering if my life, the hard one, the cracked, open one, has any less glory in it than someone else’s gentler story. And I know the answer. I feel the answer, like a pulse under my bruised skin: a difficult life is not less worthy of being lived, it’s just heavier to carry.

Joy floats like feathers. Sorrow hangs like stone. But somehow, somehow, I’ve learned to carry both.

I used to think pain was something to survive. Now I know it’s something to steward. Because when your heart has spent years cradling grief…when you’ve cupped your hands around sorrow until it stopped trembling, you realize: joy may dance, but sorrow roots you.

And the rooted ones—the ones who have groaned in travail and still whispered, “Even this, Lord”—they are the ones who carry something sacred.

The world doesn’t just need storytellers.

It needs lamplighters in the tunnels.

It needs the ones who saw no light at the end… but who didn’t throw the tunnel away.

They picked it up like a telescope and looked deeper. And when they looked, they found something most people miss: That even the darkness is declaring something holy.

They found that shadows don’t always mean absence, they sometimes mean glory concealed. They found that silence doesn’t mean God left, it means He’s about to whisper.

And in that whisper, they discovered truths so weighty, even the light would bend to them. Truths that could bring the strongest pride to its knees.

So no… my life is not less for being painful.

It is proof of God’s sustaining power.

Proof that what doesn’t make sense can still be sacred. Proof that you can bleed in your heart and still carry fire in your spirit.

Don’t be ashamed of the ache.

Don’t be ashamed of the weight you carry.

You’ve been lifting the nearly impossible.

And somehow, with God, you’ve become a shelter for others beneath it.

Your burden has not broken you.

It has made you beautiful.

And this world desperately needs more beautiful like that.