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.

Because our fall was detachment from God, our restoration is found only in attachment to God. If our first sin was to turn from God, detach the fruit from the tree, and savor it, then our return to wholeness is to turn, attach to God, and savor Him. Though our fall broke our attachment to God, He makes a way to us, slips His arms around us, and whispers all will be well now because He is Immanuel, God with us. Our story can only know restoration if our attachment to God is restored.

There are real ways to simultaneously decrease your pain and increase the number of ways you have to navigate through the pain, and there is a real way through. Actively, bravely trust. Reroute all this thinking about this disappointment—toward a different possibility. Every day, you can make it your way of life to find one way to reroute. You can make it your way of life to see.

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.

When you find yourself on a way you wouldn’t choose, and can’t change, choosing to believe that you’re still chosen for a good way is the only way through.

How a man proposes isn’t what makes him romantic. It’s how a man purposes to lay down his whole life that makes him romantic.

Prayer isn’t about moving heaven to do things our way but about moving us to do things God’s way on earth.

Prayer isn’t giving God information to act upon but God giving us intimacy to rest in. What undergirds every single prayer is the reality that we are held by our Father.