Here’s something I know. I like it when life is easy. I don’t like to be uncomfortable. I don’t like to be sad. I don’t even really like to be moderately hot or one bit hungry. I like to know what’s around the next corner, and I like to be in the middle of a book that I don’t want to put down at all times. Here is something else I know. When I am comfortable, I don’t learn. I don’t grow. I am not stretched, and I am not forced to adapt to the world outside of my cozy world I have created. It is only in the midst of hard things that we grow. Growing is good. Growing makes us wiser, stronger, more sure of who we are and what we are capable of. We grow when things are hard. Therefore… hard times are good for us. Not in a “I’m going to bang my thumb with a hammer to make myself wiser” way. And DEFINITELY not in a “I am going to dismiss my discomfort with your pain by just saying this is all part of God’s plan” way. But, hard times stretch us. They make us reach just a few inches further for the next handhold. They make us question the status quo, question our unexamined beliefs, and test our world to see what we are capable of. Pain is an incredible teacher. A really mean, unforgiving one, but a teacher nonetheless. I recently read a passage in Glennon Doyle‘s new book, Untamed, that put this beautifully:Grief shatters. If you let yourself shatter, and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled. You are whole again, and strong, but you are suddenly a new shape, a new size. The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain- whether it’s a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a canyon of grief lasting decades- it’s revolutionary. When that kind of transformation happens, it becomes impossible to fit into your old conversations or relationships of patterns or thoughts or life anymore. You are like a snake trying to fit back into old, dead skin, or a butterfly trying to crawl back into its cocoon. You look around and see everything freshly, with new eyes you have earned for yourself. There is no going back. Pain is an incredible teacher. But learning her lessons will change you. If we come out of this coronavirus season the exact same people we were going in, we have learned nothing. Change is good. Change is growth. Change is beautiful. And one day, you will realize that some of its lessons were worth the cost.