You Can Hope & Hurt at the Same Time

I spend a lot of time encouraging others who are going through difficult times, and I talk about how important it is to focus on the good, to stay positive, and to find things you are thankful for. But I always want to make sure that I’m not implying that regardless of what you are going through, you should always just slap a smile on your face to get through it. I want to make sure I don’t give the impression that it’s not ok to be not ok.

Successful perseverance involves acknowledging both the good and the bad, but choosing to focus on the good. It’s allowing ourselves to feel and process the negative, but not letting that negativity back in once we’ve gotten it out. It’s skewing our everyday self-talk and conversation towards the good and the hope and the healing, and not speaking words of despair over our lives.

It does not mean pasting a smile on your face and pretending like everything is hunky-dory. That is fake, and no one benefits from fake hope. And it does not mean shoving away your feelings and not processing through them, because that is denial, and no one benefits from that either.

It’s both. You can hope and hurt at the same time. Just because you are suffering well through your trial doesn’t diminish how difficult the trial is. And just because you are talking about how hard things are for you right now doesn’t mean you aren’t handling it well, either. You can be both.

I recently read “The Next Right Thing” by Emily P. Freeman, and she discussed how our life story has an arc, but the arc is made up of several plot points. The plot points may go up and down, but we should aim for our life narrative to have an arc of joy and hope.

“The story arc can be one of hope even though each part of the story may have had its share of hopelessness. The story arc can be one of faith even though the characters may have shaken fists and asked hard questions and yelled at the top of their lungs. The story arc is joyful even when the people are broken.” – Emily P. Freeman

It’s both.

I hope that the narrative of my life is characterized by joy and hope, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t many shadows of gray along the way. There are many, many, plot points I found zero joy in. I found this to be such a perfect description of the joy I try to describe.

I hope this encourages you to make the arc of your life story one of hope and joy and life as well!

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