Life is hard. Sometimes, it’s really hard.

I don’t know about you, but when things get hard I want to give up. I want to try and avoid them, because I don’t enjoy it when things are hard. But we’re not going to shy away from hard things. We’re going to do them.

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.  And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
Romans 5:3-5 NIV

This verse can seem a bit complicated. Why would we be happy about suffering? Instead of suffering we can replace that with hard things.

See when we go through hard things it causes us to grow. It makes us better at dealing with different situations. Because we grow when we do the hard thing, it means, in the long, run it’s better for us.

The path of greatest resistance leads to the prize of greatest reward

Imagine your homework. The easy thing to do would be to not do your homework. This would be what we call the path of least resistance. It’s easy.

But if you don’t do your homework then you are likely to get a detention. Then even further down the line when you come to do exams you’re more likely to get a bad grade. So your path of least resistance has ended up with a prize of least reward. In short, the prize sucks.

Now let’s reverse that. You get your homework and you choose to the hard thing. You’re going to study and really work hard at learning this stuff. This would be what we call the path of greatest resistance.

At first, it’s real difficult. You don’t understand it and you get a load of answers wrong. But little by little you get better. These things start making sense. Till finally you come to take your exams and you get a really good grade. Your path of greatest resistance led to a prize of greatest reward; in this case a good grade.

So when difficult things come up in life, we’re going to do them, because we want that greatest reward.