WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

by Ann Voskamp

Suffering doesn’t mean you’re cursed; suffering means you’re human. The question isn’t “Why is there suffering in my life?” but “Why wouldn’t there be suffering?” Because such is life in a broken world. The question is “What way will you bear your suffering?” I didn’t know it then, and I am still learning this now: Life is really hard because that is the reality of being alive. Life is hard in a thousand ways, and what comes the easiest to us is getting lost.

How do you let yourself feel any love when you’re drowning in rejection? You can’t waste your days waiting until things are painless to finally be joyful. You have to find a way to believe: Love lives at peace with pain, and the two will never divorce. Because to love is to be tender enough to know suffering, to be vulnerable enough to know hurt, and the only way to divorce your way from any pain is to divorce yourself from any love. The way to love always knows roads of pain—because there is no other way to ever know love.

When you trust that you’re chosen by someone good, you can trust that you’re always being taken to good places.