Endurance

 

Happy Wednesday! 

I'm just going to be honest, the beginning of this year hasn't been amazing. I'm glad that I wasn't under the impression that the minute 12 o'clock hit on January 1st that the world would be a better place and that things would get back to normal. I would have been very disappointed. 

Within the first week of 2021, I've been hit with the pretty personal blow of losing a very close friendship. Not only that, but then having it confirmed that our president for the next four years is going to be someone I'm not a fan of. There were riots and lots of people with lots of opinions about said riots on social media. It all sort of rubbed me the wrong way and just frustrated me. My depression and anxiety has been pretty bad all month. 

I learned in 2020 that the world can feel - and is - an unfair place. A frustratingly unfair place and unfortunately, 2021 is proving that to me yet again. The world is an unfair and a broken place. 

But amongst all of that, the hurt of losing someone close to me, the annoyance and concern I feel whenever I think of what the next four years may hold, the anger and frustration I feel whenever I think of everything raging on the internet right now, the one word that keeps coming to mind is endure. 

The definition of endurance is this: "the fact or power of enduring an unpleasant or difficult process or situation without giving way." In Hannah Brencher's new book Fighting Forward, she dedicated a whole chapter to endurance. This is her definition of endurance: "to remain in existence." This is what she has to say about the word endurance: "Where I thought endurance meant you outlasted everyone, I got it all wrong. Endurance means you go on living. You experience hard days, days that don't go as you planned them to, but you know in your core that the fight is not over for good. You go to sleep. You lay your tired head down. You wake up. And you try again. this is endurance - trying again, against all odds." 

Apparently God wanted to really nail in endurance for me because a week before 2021 started someone had put up a post about the link between refinement and endurance. That was where I first heard of the endure, after reading that post I latched onto that word and have held tight to it since. This girl said that without the refinement of 2020, we would not be able to have the endurance needed to persevere in 2021. 

I'm not one to pick a word of the year. I always thought it was a cool practice that other people did, but when the new year came around I was always too busy with my goals and resolutions to think of a word. Even if I would have, I don't think any words would have ever stuck. But if I could choose a word for 2020, I would choose refining. I don't think I would have chosen that on January 1st, 2020, but looking back that was the word of the year for me. And now, looking forward, I think the right word for 2021 is endure or endurance. 

2020 happened so that we could endure and run the race set before us in 2021 and beyond. God knows what is to come in this year and in the next three years. He knows and has and is preparing us for it. Refining us so that we can endure and endure some more. Another word for endurance is perseverance and that word is used a lot in the Bible. I looked up endurance in the concordance of my Bible and several verses it pointed to used the word perseverance in my NIV version. These verses in Romans 5 stood out the most to me and I think are verses we should keep in mind as 2021 unfolds. Paul mentions before these verses that we will have peace with God through Jesus Christ and have gained access by faith into the grace we now stand in. We will be able to boast in the hope of the glory of God. Then he goes on to say, "Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us." 

Paul gives us a clear road map as to where perseverance or endurance will lead us if we follow it. But do you see what has to come before perseverance? Suffering. Suffering produces perseverance. I can't think of a year that has had more suffering than 2020. No one was spared. Everyone struggled. I know I did. Right up until the very last day of 2020 and then that struggle spilled into 2021 too because why not? But I am letting that refinement, those struggles, those sufferings teach me how to endure, how to persevere. If you remain steadfast and strong in your faith with God, if you keep going back to Him every single day no matter how hard it is to do so, even if you don't feel Him at all, even if there's no spiritual breakthroughs or glorious moments to share with others, you will reap a reward: endurance. Steadfastness and strength in faith during sufferings and struggles and hard times will give way to endurance. And if you keep enduring and enduring some more, that will build character within you and that character will give way to hope. 

I don't know about you, but that's what I want in 2021. I want to hold onto hope more than anything else, but right now I feel like all I'm doing is keeping my head above water. All I can do right now is just endure and keep going. Day by day it will get better, I know it will and it has been. The healing gets easier and easier with each day and there have been a lot of happy, good things in January too, but it also feels like January has been a month of slow and steadfast endurance. Endurance that is growing a garden of character that will then sprout more and more hope within it. 

This post is becoming a full length book chapter, so let me wrap this up haha The beginning of 2021 may not have ended up the way you thought it would. Maybe you carried some baggage from 2020 into 2021 or maybe you carried a lot of baggage into this year. Maybe January 1st came around and new problems appeared mingling with problems lingering from last year. Maybe you're tired and drained from the presidential election and all the division going on. Maybe you're hurting or your worried about the future. Maybe all you're able to do right is to just get by one day at a time. 

I get it. I was there this month - I still am there sometimes. But endurance is worth the suffering and the struggles. It may not seem like it right now, but I promise it is. That refinement you're feeling? That's you having to go through the fire and being purified and melted down, so you can come out of the fire with endurance, character and hope, gleaming and bent into a new and much more beautiful shape than you were in before. 

2021 isn't going to be perfect. No year is going to be perfect. But we can continue to lean into the refinement, take one step after another with endurance and find hope through both of those things that good is coming, that our God is still good and still present and still trustworthy through all of it.