Sunday at church we were singing Hard Fought Hallelujah.
I've heard the song before, but for some reason I was really paying attention to the words this time. It's about praising God when it isn't easy. Raising your hands when life has been hard. Choosing a hallelujah when it feels like you've had to fight for it.
And as I stood there singing with my hands raised, I had this thought:
I'm really blessed. I've never had to give God a hard-fought, been-through-hell hallelujah.
God has just been so good to me.
And then I stopped.
Wait.
That's actually not true.
My parents got divorced, and it was really hard on me.
I had a broken engagement.
I lost my brother to a drug overdose.
When one of my daughters was little, she ended up in the hospital with swelling on her brain, and we had no idea what was going to happen.
I've experienced church hurt.
I've walked through incredibly difficult seasons with my kids, including watching a son I love make choices that scared me and having to figure out how to love him through them.
We brought foster children into our home, and there were days during that season that were just plain HARD. Not Instagram hard. Actually hard. Exhausting. Messy. Days full of consequences and behaviors and wondering what in the world we were doing.
So apparently, I actually have had a few hard-fought hallelujahs.
But standing there Sunday, those weren't the things that came to mind when I thought about my life.
My first thought was:
God, You've been so good to me.
And I've been thinking about that ever since.
What story are we telling ourselves?
Maybe part of following Jesus for a long time is learning not to let the hardest thing that happened to us become the biggest thing about our story.
That doesn't mean pretending it didn't hurt or calling something good that was actually awful.
Losing my brother wasn't good. Watching my child suffer wasn't good. Some of the things I've walked through with my children weren't good.
But those things aren't the headline of my life.
And I wonder how much the stories we repeatedly tell ourselves have to do with that.
We can rehearse what they did, what we lost, how unfair it was, how badly it hurt and what should have happened instead.
And after telling that version long enough, the hard thing doesn't just become something that happened to us. It becomes the lens through which we see everything else.
The season as a foster parent, I knew the stories we told would be important.
When we had foster kids living with us, I took LOTS of pictures.
And I made them memory books.
Those books weren't filled with pictures of consequences or tantrums or arguments or the nights everyone was exhausted.
They were filled with birthday cakes and outings and smiles and ridiculous moments and adventures and ordinary days when everybody was getting along.
It wasn't because the hard days didn't happen.
Trust me. They happened. 😂
I made those books because I knew someday I wanted those kids to look back on that season and remember that there was good there too.
And now when they come over and pull those books out, that's exactly what happens.
"Remember when we did this?"
"Look at this picture!"
"Oh my goodness, I forgot about that!"
The book didn't change what happened.
It helped shape what they remembered.
And I'm wondering if some of us need to do that with our own stories.
Not erase the painful pages.
Just stop making them the only pages we reread.
James does something interesting with Job
I've been reading the book of James every day this month, and there's a verse near the end that I keep thinking about.
James 5:11 talks about Job.
And if anybody had the right to tell a hard story, it was Job.
He lost his children. His possessions. His health. Almost everything.
But listen to where James lands when he talks about him:
That's interesting to me.
James doesn't ignore what Job went through. He calls it perseverance, which means there was obviously something to persevere through.
But that's not where he leaves the story.
He leaves it with the character of God.
"The Lord is full of compassion and mercy."
Job's suffering was part of the story.
It just wasn't the conclusion.
Maybe that's the hard-fought hallelujah
Maybe a hard-fought hallelujah isn't only standing in church with tears streaming down your face while you're in the middle of the battle.
Maybe it's also what happens years later when you've walked through enough battles that you could make a pretty long list of everything that's gone wrong, but that isn't the list you automatically reach for when you think about your life.
Instead, you think:
God has been so good to me.
I don't want to forget the hard things. Some of them have shaped me tremendously.
But I also don't want to give them more power in my story than they deserve.
I want to remember the people God sent at exactly the right time. The prayers He answered. The ones He didn't answer the way I wanted, but somehow carried me through anyway. The laughter in seasons that shouldn't have had much laughter. The provision. The grace. The second chances. The moments I didn't know what to do next and somehow a next step came.
Maybe that's why I could stand in church Sunday and genuinely think, I've never really had to give a hard-fought hallelujah.
Not because I haven't had hard things.
I have.
It's because when I look back over my life, the hard isn't what seems biggest anymore.
God's goodness is.
I have had some hard-fought hallelujahs.
I just remembered the Hallelujah more than the fight.