"We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.”

I was reading this morning and thinking of so many of you. Day after day I talk to many who are in such crisis and confusion. Finding hope at this new ‘ground zero’ can feel impossible sometimes.

Yet, in the somber moments of our struggle, we have to ask if we truly believe the pain we are experiencing is purposeful. If we believe it’s not, our hope diminishes and we circle the drain of despair and perceived pointlessness to our recovery and even our lives. However, if we believe this pain and this uncertainty actually has a purpose then we must find that purpose. When we believe and understand that this chaos does in fact have a purpose, we can relieve some of the pressure to know the future and hold on passionately to the understanding that even if we don’t understand, there is a purpose, there is a task at hand. We may not know what the purpose is, but as I’ve learned and written so often, some things will make more sense in retrospect than when you’re actually going through them.

Not all of you who read my writings subscribe to a Christian faith or world view. I get that. I take no issue with that whatsoever.

I’d simply like to ask you to ponder whether or not you believe this pain is purposeful? I’d invite you to stop looking at your spouse as the revealer or carrier of your purpose and look elsewhere. You can’t simply look in your pain for purpose. You’ll need to investigate what you believe about life and about faith to find purpose for your pain. I hope and pray you’ll arrive at a realistic view of your pain which will spill over into a deeper understanding that your pain has purpose in it. It’s inherently transformational, meaning God never wastes our sorrows and always has purpose in our pain. We don’t know what it is, yet we can trust and draw near to the person who has allowed this pain. Knowing this truth creates a hunger and desperation for intimacy with that being, that God, that master potter.

I pray today that you’ll draw near enough to find some hope today that there is purpose to your life and to your situation and to your own personal recovery.