My friend had one of those high-pressure jobs, the kind of job where almost any decision he made would inevitably affect the lives of others. He had just finished making some of those very hard decisions, and the stress of it all had made him physically sick. We talked awhile about all of that. Then my ailing friend spoke a phrase into the phone that found its way into the center of my life. Sometimes life is just plain hard.
Hard things are hard.
My weary friend unintentionally uttered the absolute truth in that sick-bed sentence. After all, hard things are hard. You cannot escape life's hard things. There are no detours around them or shortcuts over them. All the power of positive thinking you can muster will not take the hard edge off hard things.