On Being Done With Having a Hard Time

Today. Hmmm. Well, I'll just say that it involved a flat tire, a dead cell phone, and being locked out of my apartment. All of this is small potatoes in the realm of real problems. I'm privileged to have a car with the flat tire on it, enough money to buy groceries, and an apartment from which I can be locked out. This "bad" day made me think of some other truly bad days I've had in my life...but more on that soon. 

This past Friday night, I got to eat dinner with two of my favorites, Sam and Julia. You've met them before, but in review, they are my friends through Teach for America. They were there with me from day one of our training at the crazy summer of Institute, teaching middle school even though we would all spend our first year in lower elementary. We all were at three different schools with different challenges, but our experience was the same: it was a Hard Time. I will be real with you and tell you that my first two years of my adult career life involved lots and lots and lots of bad days. Not just "bad" days either, but the real kind. 

Julia phrased it this way: "It's so great being done having a hard time." All three of us completed two years of teaching at our placement schools, and all three of us chose to stay in this teaching profession after our commitment to Teach for America was done. We all found new jobs for our third year of teaching (a healthy decision for all of our lives) and came together to share about the new things going on. Boyfriends, husbands, apartments, coworkers, classrooms, students, principals, and travels were all on our minds and in our conversation. All those things, of course, in between our rants and raves about the fantastic food we ate at Big Jones, the place where we met. Can you say fancy fried chicken?! (Seriously, go visit.)

At the end of our night, Julia made that comment. About how wonderful it is to be past a really hard time in our lives. And how it is so special to now have that awareness of how hard it truly was, on the other side, alive and okay and still somewhat emotionally intact. I'm realizing, upon looking back, that I had no idea how lonely, depressed, frustrated, and difficult those two years were for me while I was living them. I was so obsessed with making it through the day, finishing my action items from four different managers and bosses, following my to-do lists, keeping up with grad school homework, and surviving each milestone (....Friday......Christmas...summer??...) that I had never paused to take stock and feel, truly feel, the weight of what was going on around me. I felt like a failure, but I hardly had any time to process that. Failure or not, the next day was coming and the next week had to be planned. I just kept going. My full schedule kind of saved me from feeling anything too deeply. 

Does God do that on purpose - overload your life in the hardest of times - to protect you from the hard stuff? Does he add weights to your feet so that you never look up toward the surface to realize that you're drowning? I truly think that's how we all made it: too busy running around to know that we were run down. It was chaos for sure, and these are two of the only people I have in my life who know exactly what that felt like. And yet, in those hard times, we became something. 

We became grownups, advocates (for ourselves and others), and teammates. We became teachers. We became graduates of schools and of an organization with a mission dear to all of our hearts. We became better people, capable of intelligent conversations based in experience, and more fully able to show compassion to others in a struggle because we lived one ourselves. We became more aware of our world and how we can best take our places as agents of change and redemption within it. 

So sure, we all will have "bad" days here and there. We still have hard times...sometimes...and in different ways. But it is so sweet to know, that in the ebbs and flows of life, that you have made it past a difficult season. You've come through a Hard Time and are done with it. Maybe a future season will hold something even more difficult; surely dark days are on the path of everyone's journey, right? But for now, for one Friday night, it was sweet to celebrate the light. 

The best part about being done with having a hard time?

Sharing it with friends who made it through with you.