One day down. Many, many days to go. And yesterday was hard. Not because of Ash Wednesday, though the doing-without didn’t lift my spirits. Things are just generally hard in this season of my life, and I have been struggling. I feel that there ought to be something I can do to change things, or that there was something I should have done the day before yesterday, or last year, or sometime in the 1990s, that would have made yesterday less disappointing and anxiety-ridden.

But I know that’s not how it works. That’s not what the Christian life is about. It’s not about succeeding and being comfortably happy. A fair few years ago I published a book in which I suggested that holiness is in the struggle–it’s not getting to the top that characterizes Christian life, but getting up again after every setback. (If you’ve seen the 1986 film ‘The Mission’, Rodrigo’s epic hill-climb is what I have in mind.)

Not only that, though. Tough going, in the New Testament, tends to mean that you’re on the right track rather than the wrong one. I used Acts 14.22 to show this (if you’re curious, see pp. 225-226), but certainly we would not have to look further than Matthew 7.14: ‘For the gate is narrow, and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.’

Maybe that doesn’t sound like good news in the abstract. Maybe it sounds like bad advice, perhaps, or an encouragement to wait for heavenly joy instead of resisting present suffering. But in a situation where I am wondering what I could have done to avoid this, or what I did to deserve feeling like I do, it is the best news. Because it doesn’t mean I am in the wrong place. (Now, there are all sorts of suffering that we bring on ourselves, like a bad hangover, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.)

I’m not saying the rest of Lent is now going to be easy, or even easier. I just hope that I’ll be able to remember from one day to another that this is the right road, however much I may struggle to take the next step on it.