Sometimes life presents a choice—not between easy and difficult, but between two hard paths.
I learned this when I came face to face with my alcoholism. I could see the road to sobriety clearly, and I knew what it demanded. It would be terrifying. It would hurt. It would strip me down. There would be loss, grief, and a reckoning with myself I had spent years avoiding. But if I didn’t choose it, a choice would eventually be made for me.
The other path—continuing on as I was—was hard in a different way. How much worse could it get? Would the depression deepen? Would my health fail? Would my family eventually walk away? I didn’t know the timeline, but I knew the direction. I was fucked either way. That was the tipping point.
And that’s when I learned something that still guides me.
Now, when I stand at crossroads—big or small—I hear the same quiet truth: choose your hard. One path requires commitment, discipline, and surrender. The other looks easier on the surface, but it’s filled with compromise, avoidance, and slow decay. Both cost you something. One just costs you your soul more slowly.
Spiritually, I’ve come to believe this: God doesn’t remove the weight of the path, He gives meaning to it. One hard shapes you, humbles you, and brings you closer to who you truly are. The other hard keeps you asleep, comfortable, and drifting further from yourself.
So I choose the hard that leads me home.
Prayer
My beloved God,
I know the path forward.
I know the cost of striving upward, of choosing what refines rather than what numbs.
Let me appreciate the difficult,
for the alternative is a slow descent to nowhere—quiet, subtle, and hollow.
Oh Lord, You have blessed me when I believed I had nothing left to give or receive.
You met me in the emptiness and revealed abundance where I saw only loss.
Thank You for the shaping.
Thank You for the breaking and the rebuilding.
Oh God, this journey itself is the miracle—
and it does not end here,
but carries on into eternity.
Matthew 7:13–14 (NIV)
“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
