Things Are Hard – And That’s OK

I might’ve mentioned once or thrice that I very much enjoy watching a pastor online named Allen Jackson . . .

No, you can relax. This isn’t a column trying to convince you to turn over a new leaf and follow God. First off, most of you probably did that a long time ago. And if not, well, if you want to spend eternity in hell, who am I to tell you otherwise?

Just kidding.

Sort of.

The message Jackson has been sharing of late is entitled Let’s Do Difficult. His point, which he makes infinitely better than I can, is that nothing in life worth having is gained by taking it easy.

Think about that for a second.

If you want to lose weight, well, the formula is pretty danged easy. Eat less, exercise more. Piece of cake, right? (See what I did there!) But if you really want to accomplish weight loss, it’s really, really hard – and you can take that from a guy who has topped the scales at 300 pounds!

If you want to be good at a sport, it takes practice. Lots and lots of practice.

Ditto a new skill. Want to learn a language? A new career? Be a great partner in a relationship? Be a great Mom or Dad?

They all take work, right?

Is there anything worth having in life that came easy? Maybe, but not much.

Back on that religious theme . . . hey, it’s only for a second. Watch YouTube or some social media outlets and you can find a lot of people claiming we’re in the end days. Do I buy that? No. I’m a believer that the passage from Thessalonians is accurate – we don’t know when the Lord is coming back and we won’t until He does. So maybe it’s tomorrow. Maybe it’s in 2525. I have no clue.

But what I do know is that life is harder than it used to be. It’s certainly not Great Depression hard, but it’s not a breeze like it was growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

We have radically different ideas on how many sexes there are, on what role the government has – or should have, the difference between banned books and reshelved, what constitutes an open border and / or an invasion . . . and on and on.

All of that makes life hard. Or at the very least, harder. For everyone. Doesn’t matter if you are woke, right, left, conservative, liberal, red, blue, purple . . . in the immortal words of Ringo, it don’t come easy.

Finding answers – finding common ground – is where the really hard parts dwell. And the disagreements. And the griping. And acrimony. And name calling.

Nothing worth having is easy.

So maybe the first hard step is we can start by listening to each other – listening with an open ear and open heart. I may completely disagree with folks who tell me that there are more than two genders – but I have no right to tell them THEY can’t believe that. Perhaps if I listen to them I might better understand where they are coming from?

Didn’t Dr. Stephen Covey make a gazillion bucks saying one of the ways to be highly successful was to seek first to understand before you tried to be understood?

It’ll be hard.

So were two-a-days back in high school, but we made it through those, right? This one may not culminate in Friday night lights, but it’s a whole lot more important.

Two cents, which is about how much Timmons said his columns are worth, appears periodically in The Times. Timmons is the chief executive officer of Sagamore News Media, the company that owns The Noblesville Times. He is also a proud Noblesville High School graduate and can be contacted at [email protected].