When We Can Shockingly Thrive

We have friends who are hurting as 2025 opens her front door and steps out onto the porch.

One friend has endured endless court dates and cancellations and re-schedulings of a traumatic divorce. Her children aren’t speaking to her for no apparent reason—other than perhaps they believe the lies of their dad. You can imagine how frightfully lonely and uncertain this holiday season was for her.

A week before Christmas, a writer friend of mine stepped into widowhood. You can imagine how Christmas for all the years to come will be colored by his passing.

A young friend of ours is still dealing with the emptiness and what-ifs of losing husband and toddler to the ocean. The anniversary of that day is coming up in just a few days.

Author and speaker Beth Moore had something to say about life’s difficulties:

“Since we can’t avoid difficulties and sufferings, we can ask, seek, and knock with everything in us for every gorgeous thing that is ours in Christ so that we not only can bear up in this race, we can shockingly thrive in it.”

I love Beth’s use of the word shockingly.

Because it should shock us, and it should shock the people who know us, and it should shock all of hell how splendidly we live forward as we settle into the waiting room, trusting God when life doesn’t make sense.

The Apostle Paul asked several rhetorical questions in a letter to new believers in ancient Rome:

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall troubles or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” – Romans 8:35

And then Paul answered his own questions by stating that nothing, not even death or life, can separate us from God’s love:

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” – verse 37

I think I just heard Paul say that we can shockingly thrive in adversity because of Jesus Christ.