Hard vs. Heavy

My husband and I attended a running event together this past weekend. (Yes, a running event. I talked him into it.) We got up very early. I saw the sun rise. We ran. We ate. We waited with anticipation for our numbers to be called in a raffle (which didn't happen). We took pictures. It was a stellar time and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The value of that event came into perspective later in the day when we read our devotional. The heavy of the world settled back down on my shoulders and I felt its weight. I realized that in the morning, while I was running those 14 miles, I felt relief and a reprieve. I hadn't thought about how hard life was, and for those few blissful hours, I had just been present, in the moment, and happy.

When I was in graduate school, my internship supervisor advised me to take up a hobby that would take all of my attention. "You need to be able to do something that keeps you from focusing on the hard," he said (or something like that). I have passed on that advice to many of my supervisees, but maybe it is advice I need to relearn to appreciate in my own life.

There is hard, and there is heavy. There is a difference. Some things are hard because they are heavy: death, divorce, suffering, wrestling. Other things are more "just" hard: a challenge emotionally, physically, and/or mentally. (Think survivor challenges, endurance sports, intricate hobbies, puzzles, etc.) I think sometimes we need to do "just" hard things to take our mind off the heavy. And sometimes we need to choose to do hard things in order to strengthen ourselves for the hard and heavy things.

Ask yourself: Are there any hard things I choose to do? (Because there are certainly a lot of hard and heavy things we don't choose to do.) If your answer is, "No," is there a hard task you could pick up? A challenging puzzle? A world game? A math equation? A sport? Is there a skill you could challenge yourself to learn? We can do hard things. Sometimes we just need to prove it to ourselves. And in proving it to ourselves, we get a respite from the heavy, as well as amassing strength for the moment when it comes time to pick the heavy back up again.