Difficulty and Value

I’ve never known a person to pray for a difficult life.  Most of us ask God to go before us and smooth out the wrinkles.  We pray that the hills will be lowered and the valleys be raised.  Maybe we don’t use these exact words, but we are essentially praying for an easy life.  This is how I typically pray for my family.  I ask God to eliminate problems from the lives of my children.  I pray that my wife Sara will have smooth sailing through her day.  I ask that God would deal with and resolve the problems I might encounter in the day or week ahead.  And I wonder if I am doing myself and my family a disservice by praying this way.

The Bible is filled with passages touting the benefits of hardship, suffering, and difficulty.  These challenges are lauded for what they generate in our lives: hope, perseverance, and faith.  The difficult times in our lives refine us and ultimately make us more like Jesus (who, by the way, experienced the greatest degree of difficulty imaginable).  This is not an encouragement to seek out difficulty.  But when it comes, we can take great consolation in knowing that what God produces through it is of great value.