Pursuing Veritas

“The difficulty is the point…. Sometimes we need the difficulty to get us to slow down and look at ourselves.”

James K.A. Smith (How to Inhabit Time, xv)

Right now, parenting has me at something of an impasse. One of my children (who will remain nameless) is struggling to routinely accomplish a normal, everyday task. We have coached them through this task, helped show them how it’s done, offered gentle reminders, tried positive reinforcement and bribes, offered sterner reminders, all the things. And this child continues to tells us that this task is, “hard.”

Which, in all seriousness, is probably the case. Lots of things—even things that we do every day—are hard. They’re challenging. They require intentionality and effort and will. And so in our home, we often find ourselves saying, “I’m sorry that’s hard. But we do hard things. Because some hard things are good things.”

Much of the time, those are moments that I’m not only trying to parent my kids. I’m also parenting myself. Because this definitely counts as one of things that’s easy to say, but harder to actually inhabit as belief.

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I have been in pretty intense counseling for about 30 months now using a technique called EMDR. Anne Lamott helpfully summarizes EMDR method as “where one follows the movements of a light back and forth across a two-foot bar.” There’s obviously more at work, the chief aim being the use of exterior stimuli to assist the mind in reexperiencing (and reinterpreting) certain (usually traumatic) events in the past. I’m seeing my counselor because I have a panic disorder, one where I was experiencing multiple panic attacks every single day. Thankfully, my situation has improved to where I only experience an attack or two a month.

Anyway, a few months back, I had a bad evening, where I awoke in the middle of the night in the middle of panic attack. This happened after a few good months, so it was especially disheartening. A few days later, as I was proceeding this with my counselor, they asked me a pointed question: “Jacob, how would you talk to your kids about this if it happened to them?” There’s a question I have an answer for:

“I’m sorry that’s hard. But we do hard things. Because some hard things are good things.”

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Most of us are well aware that our habits form us. We are what we do. We are what we love. Our lives are made up of the tiny moments of everyday life.

I confess that, usually, I think of habits as actionable items. Practices like Eugene Peterson or Tish Harrison Warren write about, things like prayer, meditation, exercise, waking up, brushing our teeth, calling a friend, or drinking tea. But habits also encompass the more subtle practices of our daily lives too: how we think about ourselves, the way we talk to ourselves, and the subconscious patterns we use to interpret our experiences.

Modifying those kinds of habits is tough, painful work that takes place not during the first few weeks of the year or as part of a brief period of restructuring, but as a years’ long process of ups and downs and ins and outs. And some days, those newly forming habits are just hard.

“I’m sorry that’s hard. But we do hard things. Because some hard things are good things.”

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I love descriptive images, diagrams, and maps. I’m not particularly good at creating them myself, but the right picture says more than thousands of words every could. Abstract thought is fine. But there’s just something about being able to see something that helps the mind wander a little bit less.

One image that I consistently come back to in life is the image of a lessening cycle, something like this:

While in grad school, was introduced to this image as a way to explain how grief often works. For example, immediately after experiencing the death of a loved one, our grief consumes us. It’s all we can think about. We might get moments here or there where we can think about other things, but most of life is consumed by loss. And then, as time goes on, the grief gradually lessens. A few weeks later, much has returned to normal. We still encounter grief from time to time, but it doesn’t have a hold on us like it once did. Then, after several months go by, grief again looks different. It’s still present at times, but it’s typically much less intense. And as the years go by, this change continues. Grief never really leaves us, but it fills a gradually more limited place in our souls.

A few years later, this image appeared again, this time as a way to explain forgiveness. When someone hurts us, Christ calls us to stop and forgive them. And then we go on through life until, lo and behold, something brings up that past wound and tears it open. And so, we must forgive again. For deep wounds, this cycle repeats itself again and again and again. People and situations we thought we’d forgive hang on to us—not because we’ve held on to grudges, but because we’re now in a place to better understand and experience a particular aspect of how we’ve been wronged. And so, following the words of the Lord who calls us to forgive without end, we learn to forgive again.

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I am coming to realize and internalize that this image also applies to anxiety as well. Feelings come in cycles. We deal with them at one level and life moves on. You might feel okay and things might seem normal again. But then, for reasons that may be clear or may not, something happens to bring you back. It might be less intense or consuming than before. But there it is again. And that’s okay.

So you do the hard work of working the process again. You work through another loop. You forgive again. You grieve again. You deal with your anxiety again. You feel depressed again. You process again. And—Lord willing—you find greater wholeness again. Life goes on. And the cycle repeats.

I’m coming to believe that, deep down, this is how God made us.

As timeless creatures bound in time, we need to experience most things more than once for us to really internalize and come to peace with the realness of reality. It seems easier to experience something once and then never think about it again. But that’s not who we are. It takes time to truly learn and grow and experience the transformation for which we’re created. This is part of becoming redeemed people. We feel. And then we feel again. And then we grow. And then we feel again. And through those hard moments, God gives us opportunities to become more like Him. 

“I’m sorry that’s hard. But we do hard things. Because some hard things are good things. Because sometimes, the difficulty is the point.”