Untamed

I’m currently reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle and it’s really powerful.  She writes, “There is no glory except straight through your story.  Pain is not tragic.  Pain is magic.  Suffering is tragic.”

And it reminded me that pain and suffering are two different things.  Pain can be felt physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually but it’s what makes us grow.  When we walk through it.  Suffering is how we see the pain.  If we see it as unfair or undeserved our perspective brings suffering.  And the suffering is the hardest part.

I once heard the saying that if we all put our troubles on the table, we’d take our own back.  Everyone has a story.  A painful story.  A skeleton in the closet.  A vulnerability.  Fears.  Feelings of inadequacy.

We’re all more alike than different.

And as Glennon reminds us in Untamed, “Like Wesley from The Princess Bride, who said, “Life is pain, Highness.  Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

So if we accept that there will be pain and decide to embrace it as something that happens, then what?  We will change and grow and gain perspective and find out that it taught us a lesson we might never have known otherwise.

Pain points.  Growing pains.  Pain in the neck.  Enough pain to go around.

Let’s decide that we will all have pain and we’ll walk through it together.

Because there’s no glory except straight through your story, right?