What You Gotta Go Through - A passage through Suffering
“You can never get around,
What you gotta go through.”
Lyrics from Go Through It by: Griffin House
No one wants to suffer. No one wants to grieve or carry the unspeakable pain of saying goodbye to someone they love. No one wants to wake each morning beneath the weight of depression or live with a diagnosis that offers little hope of change. No one wants to watch prayers go unanswered or hopes slowly die—hopes that once fluttered like spring sparrows in the heart.
Yet we can never get around that we gotta go through.
The suffering before each of us is our suffering. No one else can bear it for us. Others can walk beside us, encourage us, and help carry our burdens, but they cannot suffer our suffering in our place. We must choose to face it. Whether we believe it is fair or cruel does not change the reality before us. Once the wick of suffering is lit, there is only one way through it: the flame burns until it has exhausted itself.
We rarely choose suffering, but we will all encounter it. Perhaps the most important questions we can ask are: what will I do with this suffering and ho ow will I respond to it? Will I allow it to harden me, hollow me, or refine me?
Our answer to those questions often determines whether suffering becomes something that crushes us or something that transforms us.
I don't know about you, but I do not want to be crushed by my suffering. If suffering's only purpose were to defeat me, then why endure it at all? Why keep hoping? Why keep fighting? Why keep loving? If defeat were inevitable, resignation would seem like the only reasonable response.
But I believe there is another way.
Though these words may not lessen your pain or promise that things will get better, I hope they awaken something within you—a quiet but determined resolve to fight for more. I hope you will allow suffering to become a furnace that refines rather than consumes you; a fire that forms you into someone deeper, truer, more compassionate, and more fully alive.
We all must pass through suffering. There is no path around it.
The question is what we will do while we are passing through.
Your answer will shape the person you are becoming.
By: Jonathan Moore, LMFT
