I had a dream several years ago. I was in the bottom of a very deep cavernous hole in the ground. I was climbing up. I could see the light above me. It was still hundreds of feet off. There were creatures in the hole that were there to grab me and pull me down. But they could only go part way up and no further, because a boundary had been marked and they were not allowed to cross it. I passed that mark and then they no longer were able to grab me at all. Now it was just about climbing.

I knew, as I was climbing in the dream, that outside of that deep hole was an environment that I was not strong enough to survive in. I also knew something else that is hard to describe. I knew that the only way I could become strong enough to live up there, was this struggle of making my way toward it. In other words, if I was suddenly somehow miraculously deposited topside, I wouldn’t even be able to live in the environment. That the process of getting there was detrimental to my success once I made it.

I have heard it said that it is the struggle of a baby chick breaking out of its shell that makes it strong enough to survive on the outside. The knowing I had Ibn this dream was just like this.

I was somewhere in the middle of a very long journey of healing at the time of this dream and I had learned very deeply by this point that struggle was the enriching ingredient that would not only get me to the places I was meant to go and the person I was meant to be, but it would create them.

This world is a place where struggle is both our curse and our blessing. A type of gravity that ever pulls us toward failure and loss. But a resistance that creates strength and resilience. We live in a cycle in which struggle perpetually pulls on us and hinders us, while simultaneously being our main catalyst for growth, the opposition that gives us the potential to become great should we make it to the other side of each struggle we face, great or small.

In my years of analyzing struggle from the inside, two truths are apparent.

Struggle Truth One: Struggling for something increases the value of that thing. Something easily attained will most always be valued less than something one has fought for, bled for, went through hell for, waited longingly for. Attaining too much with little effort breeds ungratefulness like bacteria in a cesspool. But working hard to achieve things, this is the absolute recipe for gratitude and makes success so much sweeter.

Struggle Truth Two: Struggle makes us stronger. There is an old proverbial tale of a man who was told by God to move a large boulder. He spent day after day pushing on it with all his might. Weeks and months passed, then years, and the rock never budged one centimeter. The man then says to God, why on earth would you ask me to move this when you knew it was unmovable? And God said, look at your body. Look how strong you are, after all this time of such effort and persistence. Moving the rock was never the goal. It was the strength you built while trying.

When we get what we want, we often stop searching. We stop pushing. We sit down and relax. We rest and become complacent. We lose appreciation and gratitude for most things around us. Yet that which is hard-earned is typically valued above all else.

For some reason, it seems I was meant to have to fight for every single child I would ever have. Some people just have them. Of course there is fight in this as well. Ask any pregnant or post-natal woman about her experience and she will tell you great outlandish tales, embellished heftily, of struggle and suffering. But there was meant to be an extra measure of fighting for me. Many extra degrees of struggling involved. And I daresay, perhaps, if you are reading this, this may be the case for you as well.

The struggle did not start for me until my first child was three years old, however. I became pregnant quite easily with him, at the age of nineteen. By accident, really. While trying to prevent, actually. This is always one of the absolute worst things one woman can ever say to an infertile woman. Believe me I know. It was so easy, it was actually accidental, they say. You see, there was no way to stop it. I simply slipped and fell into reproduction. We tried to put up a barrier, but alas, we are so fertile that there was absolutely no stopping my husband’s super-sperm from busting through the roadblock and having its way with my ripe and ready egg.

I have been both of these woman. The super fertile one that got pregnant by accident, had a nearly effortless pregnancy and birth and snapped back into a size two by the time my breast milk came in. I have also been the one whose body is infertile, the one trying to hold pleasant facial expressions while a super-fertile woman bragged about how easy it all was for her.

So it is true. No matter how difficult pregnancy and labor and delivery are, the method of attaining young is simply easier for some than others. Some of us have to fight and work and suffer and wait in different ways and much longer and harder than others. Again this is the evidence of the resistance of an imperfect world where fertility carries with it a curse. A place where millions of seeds swirl around us at any given moment but only a small fraction of them will ever grow into something greater.

But when I temporarily lost my boy in a messy and twisted divorce scandal that I was too weak and young to fight against at the time, this was when my true labor began. And I have had to fight ever since. I had to fight for years against a controlling family to be allowed to parent my son. And then my body and soul began fighting against barrenness after that. The fight has been thirteen years running now. And only now am I finally seeing my second child on the horizon (patience, dear reader, all in due time).

This is where perspective becomes of absolute make-or-break importance.

One of my favorite prayers is God, I trust the struggle.

It means, I acknowledge and understand that struggle is a part of, and often the vehicle for, the greatest blessings God wishes to give me.

Avoiding it will rob me. Complaining and whining about it makes me a fool who does not see clearly. And fighting against it, begging God to remove it from my story, is asking for my life to be less effective, my character to remain weak, myself to remain less blessed.

Rejecting struggle is rejecting blessing.

We will always be waiting for something. We will always have to fight for some things. To search for some things that are lost or elusive. And all the while we will inevitably be related to or live next-door to someone who appears to have found it accidentally one day. Sometimes this is true. But sometimes we just fail to see that they struggled for it too, because struggles tend to be private things. And we can either be tortured by this comparison, and drag our feet through every struggle, or we can train our minds to see a larger wider view of it all.

I knew the children I would welcome into my family one day, by some sort of miraculous birth or adoption, would carry the immense value of every one of thousands of moments of struggle I had put into becoming their mother.

See, the labor is part of what creates the bond. And if we cannot labor physically to birth them, we must still labor in many other ways, so that their value to us is increased. I worked so hard for you. You were not just deposited on my doorstep. I cried and bled and searched and prayed for you. Your value is immeasurable. 

There is a concept in childbirth called active labor. This is where you move with the pains in a way that lets your body open up instead of clench up in the pain. Cooperating in this way reduces the pain and speeds labor and delivery. Women who have fear and resist the pains, who clench against them, can create more pain and a longer more difficult labor.

We are to fight our way through struggles, but we create more pain for ourselves if we fight against them. So I encourage you, whatever struggle you are in right now, find out how to move with the pains, to open yourself to them and let them do their job in bringing you whatever it is they are trying to bring.

Trust the struggle. Move in the struggle with acceptance. Cooperate with it. Because this struggle, whatever it is, has the power to birth something in your life, even if that thing is simply more strength.

 

Liked this post? Follow this blog to get more.