Toxic Sorrow

Complaining is the worst way to deal with real hardships. It’s highly contagious, talks to everyone but God, idealizes the past, minimizes God’s present provision, and abdicates our ability to redeem the situation. In short, it breeds mistrust in God. Believers, however, have rich resources to resist complaining – starting with a better mediator than Moses: Jesus himself – who absorbed the wrath of God that we deserved. Jesus invites us to lament our hardships directly to God as a way of sharing in his sufferings. And the better we understand the death-and-resurrection pattern of Jesus’ life, the more we trust that good things await us, too. Even better, his Holy Spirit empowers us to improve and redeem our hardships in ways that bless others with contagious hope.