What If Endurance Isn't What You Think It Is?

Can I ask you something before we get into anything else? When you hear the word “endurance,” what comes to mind? For a lot of people, it’s gritting your teeth. It’s holding on by sheer willpower until the pain finally lets go of you. It’s the marathon runner at mile twenty-three, face twisted, just trying to survive the next hundred yards. And if that’s the picture in your head, I understand why grief feels so exhausting. Because if endurance means white-knuckling your way through loss, you’re going to run out of knuckles.

I want to sit with you for a few minutes and ask a different kind of question. Not “how do I get through this,” but “what if I’m not supposed to get through this alone, and what if endurance looks different than I’ve been told?” That one honest question can change how you see endurance—but most of us never slow down long enough to actually ask it. We’re too busy trying to outrun the ache, or perform our way past it, or convince everyone around us that we’re fine.

Hope in the middle of grief

I’ll be honest with you, because I think honesty is the only place this conversation can really start. I am walking through a valley of deep grief myself right now, because of a loss I’m carrying. I’m not writing this from the far side of the mountain, looking back and telling you how it all worked out. I’m writing it from inside the valley. And what I can tell you, without any exaggeration, is that I have a solid hope sustaining me in the middle of it—not because the pain has lifted, but because I know who God is and who I am in Him. That confidence hasn’t erased the grief. It’s held me steady inside it. In fact, I’m in the process of finishing a book about exactly this, called Hope While Grieving, because I’ve come to believe that hope and grief were never meant to compete for the same heart. They can occupy it together.

Grief has a way of rearranging the furniture of your soul. Maybe it’s the loss of someone you loved. Maybe it’s a marriage that ended, or a friend who betrayed your trust, or a dream that quietly died somewhere along the way and nobody sent flowers for it. Whatever the shape of your loss, you know the strange weight of it—how it can sit on your chest in the morning before you’ve even opened your eyes, how ordinary moments like grocery shopping or answering an email suddenly feel like wading through water.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and I say this gently, because grief doesn’t respond well to being rushed: endurance isn’t the absence of pain. It’s not gritting through until you feel nothing. Endurance, the kind that actually holds up over the long haul, is what happens when you let sorrow and hope live in the same room without one of them getting kicked out.

Honest prayer can hold both

That might sound impossible right now. Maybe hope feels like a stranger to you, someone you used to know but haven’t heard from in a while. I think that’s exactly why the psalms are still so precious to people three thousand years later—because they weren’t written by people who had it all figured out. They were written by people who were honest.

Take Psalm 13. It opens like a complaint, almost like David is arguing with God: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” That’s not polished, church-lobby language. That’s a man saying, “I am tired, and I don’t understand why this is taking so long.” If you’ve ever felt guilty for praying that honestly, let this be permission. God isn’t asking you to fake composure in front of Him. He can handle your “how long.”

But watch what happens by the end of that same short psalm. David doesn’t get an explanation. He doesn’t get his circumstances fixed in six verses. What he gets is a decision, a turn of the heart: “But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.” That’s not denial. That’s endurance. He’s still in the same situation, but he’s chosen to remember who God has been to him before, and he lets that memory steady him for what’s ahead.

I think that’s the piece we miss. We treat grief like a problem to solve instead of a road to walk. And on a road, you don’t need to see the whole distance to keep moving—you just need enough light for the next step. That’s the picture in Psalm 23, isn’t it? “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Notice it doesn’t say God removes the valley. It says He walks through it with you. There’s a difference between a shepherd who airlifts you out of danger and a shepherd who stays close beside you while you walk through it. The second kind builds something in you that the first kind never could—trust that survives.

And then there’s Lamentations, which might be the most surprising book to find hope in, because it’s literally a book about devastation. The writer has watched his city fall apart. And right there, in the middle of all that wreckage, he writes these words: “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” He doesn’t say “yet this I feel.” He says “yet this I call to mind.” That’s important. In the middle of grief, hope is often not a feeling you stumble into. It’s a truth you deliberately remember, especially on mornings when feelings have nothing encouraging to offer you.

Strength does not require silence

I want to speak to something specific for a moment, especially to the young men reading this. So many of you were taught, somewhere along the way, that strength means shutting emotion down. That a real man processes loss quietly, quickly, and alone, and then moves on like nothing touched him. I understand where that comes from, but I want to gently push back on it, because it isn’t strength—it’s suppression, and suppression always finds a way to leak out sideways, usually as anger, numbness, or isolation. Real strength is learning to let sadness, anger, confusion, and even hope exist in you at the same time, without treating any of them as the enemy. You are not defeated because you feel the weight of a failure or a loss. You are not weak because grief shows up in your chest before it shows up in your words. What defines you isn’t the absence of hard emotion—it’s whether you let hope stay in the room with it, the way David did, the way the writer of Lamentations did. That’s not softness. That’s endurance being built in real time.

Small acts of remembering

So what does that look like practically, on a Tuesday afternoon when the house is too quiet or the phone call you were dreading finally comes? I don’t think it looks like forcing yourself to feel better. I think it looks like small, honest acts of remembering. Maybe it’s writing down one thing God has been faithful in before, even if it has nothing to do with your current loss—because faithfulness in one season is evidence for every season after it. Maybe it’s letting yourself say the Psalm 13 kind of prayer, the “how long” prayer, without editing it into something more polite. Maybe it’s simply getting outside for ten minutes and letting your eyes rest on something growing, as a small physical reminder that mornings do come, and mercies do arrive new with them, whether you feel ready for them or not.

If I could leave you with one next faithful step, it would be this: today, write down one true thing about God’s faithfulness—something you’ve seen before, in your life or someone else’s—and put it somewhere you’ll see it tomorrow morning. Not because it will erase the grief. It won’t. But because remembering is how hope gets its foothold, and a foothold is often all endurance needs to keep going.

You are not required to have this figured out. I certainly don’t, not fully, not yet. You’re not failing because the sadness is still there. Grief and hope were never meant to be enemies fighting for the same space in your heart—they can sit together, the way Psalm 13 sits together, complaint and trust in the very same breath. And you don’t have to walk this road without company. That’s really what we’re here for—not to rush you past your grief, but to walk with you toward wholeness, one honest, faithful step at a time, with strength for today and real hope for what’s ahead.

If any part of this stirred something in you, we’d love to walk alongside you. Reach out to Pillars whenever you’re ready.