What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?
“The Hard Years”—blessing or curse?
Mencius wrote: “When Heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will first tax his sinews and bones with hardship.” But if this belief fails to prove itself through suffering, then what remains true?
The positive thinker knows that rain falls on every life. Disappointment is part of the human lot—even if it fills every chapter. And while we say, “Fail to plan, plan to fail,” life rarely follows our blueprint. When it doesn’t, what drives us forward? And who becomes our strength?
In my youth, I rejected the old saying that “eight or nine times out of ten, life does not go your way.” My own creed was bolder: “Eight or nine times out of ten, life does go your way—as long as you do your best.”
With maturity came clarity: the gap between wants and needs, between expectation and reality, between hope and hopelessness. Yet how do these distinctions steer us through hard times?
In my own difficult seasons, I learned that God’s grace is not merely a page in Scripture—it is a living reality. Hope in Him is substance, not sentiment. I bear witness: “His grace is sufficient, and His power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
So when I reflect on “The Hard Years,” I do not hesitate to affirm: where trials abound, grace abounds all the more; and where grace abounds, fruit-bearing follows.
Ten years ago, the Lord’s call to serve hospital patients came through my own medical accident—a severe wound that landed me in hospital for seven days. During that time, I suffered not only from haemorrhage but also from a deeper wound: I felt the groans of the patients around me as my own. Their hopelessness became visceral through my pain. At first, I thought this was simply God’s answer to my prayer for volunteer guidance. But as the years of service stretched on, I came to see it as God’s way of building me in Christ—for eternal abundance.
So I have lived to prove this: life’s hardest moments are snapshots of a greater truth—greater responsibility demands greater endurance, and severe hardship forges greater leaders.
I hope this reflection does not reopen old wounds, but rather invites you to carry today more lightly. And may this poem stir your own remembrance of how grace found you in the hard years.
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✨The Pain of Pain ✨
Those who have known pain
read it in another’s eyes—
a dialect only the wounded recognise.
The poor-made-rich recall the hollow of lack.
The twice-born loathe the cross they carved themselves.
Who drinks the bitter cup that others might taste grace?
If you know who—the knower knows no more of pain.
I lay seven days—my blood, their groans,
a second haemorrhage of knowing:
this is the world’s true language.
I came to serve—but the cup turned in my hand.
The healer becomes the wound;
in that inversion, the first grace is found.
Bless the hard years—they carve the icon from the stone.
The cup of gall overflows to fill the thirst of all.
Now I walk the wards and say to those who ask:
I too have asked—and found Someone near.
Not explanation—but a hand that holds
and will not let you burn.
The knower knows no more of pain,
for the Known has made it new.
en yan hua fang 