When the Pain Is More Than You Can Carry, Start Here
After a 22-year marriage ended, I faced a choice: become bitter or better. A personal reflection on divorce, grief, forgiveness, faith, and healing.
Hey there! Pastor Chris here and today’s article is from a fellow-substacker: Derek Hughes. If you’re walking through the valley today, this article is for you.
My marriage ended after twenty-two years. The bin lorry still came on Tuesday.
Two kids. A house I’d always assumed would hold us. Half empty now. For weeks the ordinary world felt obscene. People queuing for coffee. The sun coming up as if nothing had happened. I kept waiting for the world to notice what had broken.
It never did.
One of them brought me a cup of tea I hadn’t asked for. Didn’t say anything. Just put it down. Then a question arrived. It wasn’t gentle, and I couldn’t put it down. It skipped the obvious ones, will you survive this, whose fault was it, and went straight for the throat.
How are you going to walk through this?
Walk through. The verb mattered. Through the middle of it, on my feet, instead of lying down in the hallway and hoping someone would carry me out.
I didn’t have an answer. But the question changed the shape of the days.
Sooner or later comes to us all
None of us gets a pass on this.
Divorce. A diagnosis. A job you’d have sworn was permanent, gone by Friday. Or the slower kind of collapse, the one with no headline: a life that works on paper and feels hollow in the chest.
The pain takes different shapes. The ache underneath is the same.
And it always arrives carrying a question. We assume the question is why me, or how long. The harder one waits underneath: which version of me walks out the other side? Sooner or later it finds everyone.
The one thing we get to decide is who we become inside it.
I won’t pretend any of this is easy. There are nights you cry until your ribs hurt, and mornings you wonder if you’ve already laughed for the last time. One night I stood at the kettle for ten minutes and couldn’t remember why I’d come downstairs. None of it feels holy.
Bitterness has good arguments.
It can list every reason you’ve earned it. The case for the prosecution practically writes itself. Hardening starts to look like realism. Letting it go looks like letting them off. Bitterness markets itself as armour. It works like rust.
One choice stays yours. Curl inward or stay open. Nurse the grievance or reach for a hand. Harden, or stay soft. I overthink most things. This time I didn’t. The answer surfaced on its own, a few days in:
I will come out of this better, not bitter.
There was no plan behind it. Just an instinct that bitterness would be a second death, and two children watching to see which way I’d go. Forgiveness feels like losing, right up until it turns out to be the thing that sets you free.
So I chose the harder road. Forgiveness instead of building the case. My kids ahead of my grievances. Friends I trusted to hold me up on the days my legs went. It didn’t take the grief away.
It gave me somewhere to walk. I had no idea what the walking would make of me.
Where life gets made
There’s a line in the Bible that used to make me wince.
Writing to people under real pressure, James tells them to count it pure joy whenever they face trials of many kinds. Joy. In suffering. It reads like a bad joke. Or worse, like someone who’s never lost anything telling you to cheer up.
But he isn’t handing out slogans. He’s making a claim about what pain can do to a person who lets it. Grow something durable, a character with actual weight. We treat suffering as an interruption to life. James treats it as the place that life gets made. None of this asks for a fake smile.
It points past the ache to what’s standing when it clears.
Sit through a eulogy and watch what matters rearrange itself. Nobody mentions the promotion, the house decor, the box set you stayed up too late to finish. They talk about whether you were kind. Whether you showed up. Whether you could be trusted.
You stand there and nod, because you already knew. The life we pour ourselves into building isn’t the one that gets remembered. Which means that life gets made in the breaking.
And if you’re in one, it hands you a question you can’t put down.
What to carry
Maybe you’re standing in your own rubble as you read this.
A friendship that cracked. A dream that slipped away while you weren’t looking. Or a loss with no date and no one to blame, the kind that thins you out over years. That counts too.
You don’t need a catastrophe to be allowed to grieve it.
If so, here’s what I’d say across the table. Don’t numb it. Don’t let it make you hard. The strength to come out softer instead of harder isn’t something most of us can manufacture. It’s asked for. We carry a private rule that we should manage this alone, that reaching for help, or for God, is proof we weren’t strong enough. The rule is the thing keeping us hard. So ask anyway.
Make me better, not bitter. Pray it stubbornly.
And when your own ground gives out, carry one question in your pocket: how am I going to walk through this?
The ground can break. You don’t have to break with it.
If life has disappointed you, but something in you still aches for real, A Little Nudge explores the way of Jesus without the baggage.
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