Hard Pressed? Does it Feel Like Everything Is Caving In On You?

2nd CORINTHIANS 4:8-

We are hard pressed on all sides, but we are never crushed."

This is a powerful message (my brother communicated to me).  It resonates with me personally because it is reassurance, that when everything is weighing on me, and when I feel like I just cannot take any more - I remember that I will only be... 

    ..."hard pressed on all sides, but never crushed." 

Some may say, "It is not good to be hard pressed."  Well, I say, "It is no good to be crushed, and being hard pressed is something we have experienced from birth."  Beginning in the womb, we are stressed and hard pressed.  We are ALL born in a dark place,  and in months we are forced out of this beautiful dark place and into the light. During birth, our bones are pressed and our skulls are squeezed to the point of shifting and reshaping. However, eventually our bones and bodies begin to grow, and our skulls take their shape.  

To each's own, we grew in our own beauty and light, and we grew up to be beautiful human beings.  At the end of the day, month, or year, we all blessed in the light and the dark.  We lost friends, and we fostered new relationships with other friends.  SOme of us broke up with girlfriends, and some of you ladies have had bad experiences with boyfriends. Yet we still move on to find different kinds of people in different places, and we are able to create the feelings we once felt for those who no longer stand beside us...

We win some and we lose some.  We destroy things and we give life to other things. We come from the dark and enter the light; AND we revisit the dark every 24 hours, and then light is shed upon us again.

As we grow up into children, we are pressed by life, relationships, and more confusion about the new world we are settling into. All of us (as children) at some point or another, threw our hands in the air, opened our mouths, and screamed 'bloody-murder,' or pouted to the extent of our parent's disgust and frustration. We all did. Only moments later we were eating out of their hands and off of their table: and in no time, speaking again to our parent as if a situation never occurred.  We were not able to remain angry at our parents for a long length of time, and this is a small example of being hard pressed but not crushed.  

As a child we always found enough love in ourselves to forgive our parents for whatever they did to piss us off as children, lol.  No really, our arrogance as children helped us to feel entitled to what our parents should and shouldn't be doing, but it eventually worked out (that is if you are here, in existence, and able to read this blog in the physical).

Then we grew up to be teenagers and entered into a world of pain - life.  Our understandings were greater, our vision were more keen, and we moved further into the depths of complex social situations.  Many of us as teens have also experienced in some way shape or form, the unbearable pain of confusion, suffering, envy, hate, etc... At least once in our teenage lives we have found ourselves wanting to give up on something - whether it be school, a girlfriend or boyfriend, a job, a family member: in some cases, life entirely.  Then today, we are present with an understanding of our misunderstandings.  We have the ability to dissect and evaluate problems and situations we deal with on a daily basis.  As a result, those things we gave up on, we have gained and acquired time and time again, and sometimes not always in the same form.  For example, the teen who gives up on school (such as myself) and believes it's all over for education, learning, and his or her future (as society would have us believe): however, he or she finds a job because he or she is good with his or her hands, learns new things that help to make enough money to help pay for school, which the young person now desires to attend because he or she is interested and motivated to open and own their own business.  Hard pressed on all sides, but never crushed.

As adults we all have had those days.  Those days when we have had enough, and we soon break or explode; those days when we are in the car pounding on the steering wheel, making so many destructive claims about what we are about to do out of anger; those days when we do or say things we normally would not, and regret those things we said after we say them- because of how harmful they can be for both parties. As adults it can even be harder to forgive and remember because we are so trained, so into our own ways, so convinced that we are right and that we are so much smarter than our surroundings that we refuse to forgive and move on, that we cannot allow ourselves to remember what is good and what is healthy.  We create walls- so it's no wonder we are hard pressed on all sides by the time we are adults. It is no wonder that we feel all sides closing in much more than when we were children because these walls we've created are trying to crush us- then finally, one day we realize what is happening. 

This is a vital time! It is this time that we need to take that moment to REMEMBER, as well as forgive. Remembering is important because we all need to remember to lean on someone, to know that we have support around us: loving friends, family, and strangers who care.  Remembering that we have a life vest (support group, circle of friends, faith, community) that we can put on helps us, but we must be true to ourselves and where it when it is needed most.  It is the life vest that can float you to shore: meaning, sometimes, it can take another friend, family, or someone else to show you the way to forgive someone you think you may know how to forgive on your own.

"We are all hard pressed on all sides."  We all go through not just bad times, but heart-wrenching, rockbottom, spine-cracking times: times that leave us exhausted with one or no punches left, no energy to take another step, no more feeling left to understand emotion: we all experience theses times in our own ways and in different ways, but we are never finished - We are never crushed.

We lose some and we win some.  

We destroy things and we give life to other things.

We come from the dark and enter into the light.

AND we REVISIT the DARK every 24 hours, and then light is shed upon us YET AGAIN. 

We are never crushed.

Choice M.A.S.-