The Weight of the Climb
Dear Fellow Pilgrim,
It is no easy thing to do what is good for me. Not because I do not know what would help. In many ways, I do know. I know the skills that steady my hands, clear the fog, and place my feet again on the narrow middle path—the one that leads me back to peace, back to truth, back to God. I know I should pause. I know I should breathe. I know I should ask wise questions before letting woundedness answer for me. And yet, when sorrow settles over the heart like a heavy gray coat, when grief sits in the chest and anger begins to hiss, “Forget the skills,” it becomes strangely hard to reach for the very things that might save me from myself.
And so here I am, speaking these words into the open air as I drive down a familiar road. The road to my therapist. The road to Sarah. The road to a room where, perhaps, I will remember how to breathe again. The trees pass in their quiet procession. The road bends and stretches ahead, ordinary and unbothered by the storm inside me. And I wonder, not for the first time, why this life feels so hard to live. Not every moment. Not every day. But often enough that I have learned the shape of the question. Often enough that it rises in me before I can stop it: Why am I like this? Why does everything feel so complicated? Why do relationships, especially, seem to touch the oldest bruises?
If you asked me what hurts today, I would say relationships. Interpersonal struggle has haunted me for as long as I can remember, twisting itself into the roots of my being until even ordinary conflict can feel like proof of some deeper defect. I hear the old sentence even now: “You are the common denominator.” I was told this often in childhood, and at thirty-eight, I still carry the weight of it. It sits in the body like a verdict. It makes me wonder if I am always the reason things unravel, if every falling bridge is one I secretly set aflame, if every fracture points back to me with one accusing finger.
And recently, there was another fracture. A dear friend. Almost a sister. A rift. A moment when I tried to stand up for myself, and now I cannot stop examining it from every angle. Was I skillful, or was I cruel? Was I strong, or was I selfish? Did I speak with clarity, or did I let fear put on the mask of courage? Did I use what I have learned with grace, or did I simply sharpen my pain into a weapon and call it truth? The voice returns, of course. It always does. Was it me? And I do not know. Not fully. Not yet. But I know this: God knows me. He knows the strange, trembling machine I am trying to drive. He knows the old wiring, the faulty alarms, the places where the engine sputters and the wheel pulls toward fear. And still, drive it I must. Not perfectly. Not impressively. But forward. If I want to live, I must keep moving.
Does this life seem hard to live to you? Because to me, it does. I grow tired of trying to maintain normalcy. Tired of chasing structure that will not stay. Tired of pressing my hands into the clay of my habits, only to watch them slump before they set. I try. I really do. And yet, there are moments when I find myself whispering in the dark, “Oh God, I was not made for this life. Why did You make me?” And then comes the next thought, quick and merciless: I fail at everything.
But perhaps not everything. I did finish school. I earned my degrees. I taught in classrooms. I married a good and godly man. I brought children into the world. I have done things that, from the outside, might look like success. And still, inside, there is restlessness. Not because I have done nothing. Not because my life is empty. But because I am not yet the woman I long to be. That is the grief, I think. Not only mourning what has been lost, but mourning what has not yet arrived. Mourning the distance between the woman I am and the woman I believe God is making. Mourning the unfinished painting because I ache so badly to see it whole.
Isn’t that strange? To grieve what is not yet finished? To ache because I am not yet steady, not yet gentle, not yet radiant with love, not yet healed in all the places that still flinch? It is almost foolish, like grieving a seed for not yet being a tree. Like standing over wet clay and weeping because it has not become a vessel. And yet I do it. I mourn the middle as though the middle were failure. I long for the end of the journey as though arrival were the only proof that the road has meaning. But life is not only the destination. It is the climb. The turning. The stumbling and rising. The hard, ordinary work of learning how to walk with God while still unfinished.
And He never promised that the road would be easy. He told us plainly that trouble would come. But He did not leave us stranded in that truth. He gave us His words. He gave us wisdom. He gave us the steadying rhythms of prayer, repentance, community, counsel, and love. He gave us ways to return when the ground shakes beneath our feet. And today, He gave me Sarah.
Grace came through her in the form of clarity I did not necessarily want, but needed. She helped me see that perhaps this wound, this rupture, this sorrow between me and someone I love, might have gone differently if I had been more skillful. Not fake. Not silent. Not small. Skillful. If I had held my words more carefully. If I had allowed wisdom, not woundedness, to shape my response. If I had slowed down long enough to ask what love required in that moment—not only love for the other person, but love rightly ordered, love that tells the truth without setting fire to the room.
And so I return to where I began: how hard it is to be skillful, dear friend. How hard it is to choose the wise thing when the wounded thing is louder. How hard it is to practice peace when your nervous system has already declared war. How hard it is to speak gently when you feel cornered, to pause when you want to defend, to ask questions when you want to flee, to stay present when everything in you says, “Run.” But skillful we must be. Not because skills are cold little strategies for managing life, but because skill can become an act of love. A bridge out of chaos. A handrail on the steep road. A way of saying, “I will not let my pain drive if wisdom is willing to take the wheel.”
I thought skills were useless in sorrow. I thought they were too small for grief, too practical for pain, too tidy for the mess of being human. But perhaps they are not small at all. Perhaps they are humble tools of mercy. Perhaps they are the small hinges on which a different life can open. I thought life was unbearable because I had not yet arrived. But now I remember: the journey is not a waiting room for the real life. The journey is the life. The climb is holy. The unfinished work is still beloved. I thought I was failing because I am not yet whole. But maybe I am not failing. Maybe I am becoming. Slowly. Awkwardly. Painfully. By grace.
And I am not alone. Neither are you. Somewhere on the road, in the ache between who we are and who we long to become, God is already there. Not only at the end. Not only when we finally look healed enough to be proud of. He is here—in the car, on the familiar road, in the therapist’s room, in the hard conversation, in the skill we reach for with trembling hands, in the sorrow that teaches us to become gentle. He is here, in the in-between. And perhaps that is mercy enough for today.
