Maybe you’re at the end of a long week, a long year. Maybe you’re somewhere, at the end of a life. And it hurts.

All of it hurts, and when you’re in the middle of it, it can be hard to see the good in any of it.

If you’re like me, you may have grown up in a time when you were told to have a stiff upper lip, to hide your pain so no one sees how bad it hurts. You might try a common technique called “Just Move On.” That sort of stoicism may work for a time, but what if we thought about our pain differently? What if we looked our pain in the eye and said: “This hurts terribly, but out of the ashes, shall come greatest beauty.”

What if we used our suffering to heal others, and to heal ourselves, through Jesus?

Please join me today at (in)courage, where — I pray — we can find hope in our hurts.

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