Do you have a word of the year for 2025? I don’t. But as we prepare to flip the calendar over to February, I (finally) know what word I’d pick to describe 2024. My 2024 word is endurance.
I’m not sure, exactly, when “endurance” became the refrigerator hum for the year. Maybe it was when I taught a Bible Study on James, who says we should consider it “pure joy” when we face all kinds of trials. The way James 1:2-4 tells it, the painful stuff we go through tests our faith and produces perseverance (aka “endurance”), which ultimately makes us mature and complete. Perfect, some versions say. Well-developed. Lacking in nothing.
Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I needed (or wanted) to be mature and complete. Not if it meant having to go through—having to endure—things like sickness, financial hardship, or complicated relationships. Don’t get me wrong; I know suffering can produce good things in our lives—things like compassion, humility, and even a more resilient faith. But as I considered the gut-punching pain some dear friends were waking up to every day, I wondered if those promised benefits might ring a bit hollow. “I’m not sure these gals need more compassion or a stronger faith,” I said to the Lord. “What I think they need is to have their marriage restored. Their cancer gone. Their son to come home.”
That was my take on my friends’ suffering. Remarkably, though, they had a different perspective.
None of them looked or sounded joyful, at least not the way I would describe joy. All of them shared their stories through tears, both angry and sad. But even in their heartache, they were all holding on, standing firm in their faith. And they said they were open to joy.
“I’m not there yet,” the youngest confided. “I can see how God has prepared me, and how he’s provided friends to give me counsel and comfort, but I’ve never felt this level of sadness before.
“But,” she continued, “this ache is revealing a new side of Jesus, because I’ve never needed his comfort like this before. I’ve never needed this Jesus before.”
God can handle our doubts and our questions
My young friend’s words all but undid me. She was discovering a deeper connection with Jesus as a result of her suffering, one that was transforming her faith—shaping her character and glowing her up—just like James promised. Having read somewhere that every painful experience can become a portal to intimacy with God, I went back to James to learn more about the power of endurance.
Near the end of his letter, James offers three real-life examples of what it looks like to be patient in suffering: The farmer (who has to wait for his crop), the prophets (many of whom endured ridicule, rejection, and physical pain), and Job.
Job? The guy who lost his wealth, his health, and even his children?
Not to get all testy about it, but if I am God and I want people to want to endure—to want to hang in there, when everything seems like it’s coming undone—I feel like I might pick a better, more appealing, character study. Noah, maybe, having to spend all that time shut up in the ark. Or Joseph, innocent but forgotten in prison. Almost anybody but Job, whose story only gets happy a few verses before it is over.
But the more I considered Job’s life (and processed insights from folks like Tim Keller, Warren Wiersbe, and Eugene Peterson), the more I realized that Job is actually a great role model for us when it comes to endurance. Here’s why:
Job didn’t bear his immense suffering with a stiff upper lip. He cursed the day he was born, wishing he had died as a baby. He questioned God (“Why have you made me your target?”). He got frustrated and confused when God didn’t answer.
And, through it all, he kept going.
Like the psalmist who cries How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?, Job never stopped praying. He didn’t walk away from his faith or turn his back on the Lord; he kept talking, even when God remained silent. And Job never pulled away from community—not even when his “friends” showed up to provide comfort, only to spend their days telling him what he must have done wrong.
Job didn’t retreat. Instead, he held fast to his faith, staking his trust in what he knew to be true about God:
“If I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.
But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.”
God knows the way that we take.
I have that passage—Job 23:8-10—starred in my Bible. It’s a comfort and an anchor when I feel unseen, or when I have no idea what God is up to. It serves as a testimony to the power of endurance in the hard seasons, a reminder to keep doing the things that we did when life was happy and fun: Talk to God, go to church, stick close to our friends instead of pulling away or tucking into our shell like a uncertain turtle.
As Richard Foster put it in his book, Prayer, “What we learned to do in the light of God’s love, we also do in the dark of God’s absence.”
Put one foot in front of the other
I was still teasing out my thoughts on endurance, pondering the promise of passages like Romans 5:3-5 (which traces the pathway from suffering to hope and highlights the role of endurance), when I found myself in Hawaii last December. Not to go to the beach (although the chairs and umbrellas looked mighty inviting), but to join a few friends for a marathon.
As in, a 26.2 mile marathon.
To be clear, the event organizers said we could walk the whole thing; the idea was to promote movement and fitness at every level. Still, though. Doing a marathon—at any pace—was never really on my bucket list, and I found myself, around mile 18, wondering what I had gotten myself into. It was hot (a factor we hardly noticed, since it was so humid), the course was not flat (which came as a surprise), and—truth be told—my longest training run leading up to the race was only eight miles. Because honestly. Who has time to run (or worse, walk) longer than that?
“Endurance.”
I sensed the Lord whisper that one little word as I eyeballed mile-marker 19 in the distance. Had I not been so focused on finding the next water station, I might have actually laughed out loud. Here was God, telling me to keep going. To remember the wisdom from James. To simply do what I’d been doing since the start of the race and just put one foot in front of the other.
As it was, I did not laugh. Instead, I reached into my fanny pack and pulled out the card my fitness-guru friend Alisa had given me the night before.
Psalm 55:22. “Cast your cares on the Lord, and he will sustain you.”
Could there be a more beautiful promise—mid-marathon, mid-marriage crumble, mid-health crisis, or mid-anything?
When the hard seasons come—the times when putting one foot in front of the other feels like all we can do—consider the fact that that might be enough. God never asks us to carry our burdens alone; he doesn’t even ask us to pull half the weight. Instead, he invites us to let the hard things in our lives slide off our shoulders and onto his.
Hang in there, friend.
You might not see God in your season of suffering, but he knows the way that you take. ❤️
