It will make you or break you.

It will toughen you or lay waste to you.

It has to be overcome.
A young man who is dealing with IT at the moment said, “This is not something I am stuck in, it’s something I am going through.”

IT will come….if it has not yet.

IT may have come at you already in many ways, many shapes and forms. 

You may be in the midst and middle of IT, or you may be over IT for a while.

IT will return.

IT……..is HARD.

HARD.
Hard comes in different ways.

Hard can be a relationship.

Hard can come at you as a job.

Hard can be the year you are in school.

Life consists of HARD in several different ways.

It’s good to know that it’s coming because it IS.

As the young man mentioned above heard from his Coach,

“I don’t want to make it hard. It’s just Hard.

The Hard he was referring to was football practice, in August, in the South.

Hot.

Humid.

HARD.

The young man and his teammates heard their Leader say that it has to be hard because Hard will come at some point in the next four to five months, and he wants them to be prepared by already having faced IT down.

He said it plainly….

“You have to OVERCOME HARD.”

At various times and in a multiple of ways, Life is hard.

My family moved to six different cities before I graduated high school.

My father died in 1983. My first marriage ended in 1987. My mother died in 2006.

My brother is dealing with IT at this moment. I do not want that for him. But, HARD came and now it has to be walked out.

Moses. Joseph. David. Solomon. Paul. Jesus.

All of them faced HARD. 

All overcame IT.

In January, the young man mentioned above faced HARD. He was replaced, in what he had earlier been greatly successful at, right in the middle of it.

His replacement succeeded greatly after overcoming a bit of Hard himself.

The young man who was replaced handled the HARD he had been handed …..perfectly.

That young man is still, 

as he said, 

“going through IT”.
School was hard…..at particular times.

Your job is hard, maybe a lot of times.

Marriage is hard…for some a little, for some, a lot.

Dealing with temptation is hard.

Being a Christ-follower can be hard.

Staying in shape is hard. Weight lifting, if you mean it…..is hard. Refusing to eat until you are full, is hard.

Maintaining and developing the body gifted to you is difficult….in the midst of soft chairs, air conditioning, television, refrigerators, microwaves, Alexa, Google, Shipt and remote controls.

So many appliances and conveniences make life easier all the time.

One thing that we need to know, and it’s a gift to be taught this at a young age….

is that no matter how comfortable life may get…

HARD is going to arrive 

and hit you in the mouth at some point.

And to quote Sean Connery, in his final line from, “The Untouchables”…..

“what are you prepared to do about it?”

If you are going to have success on any level,

in any endeavor 

lessons have to be learned.

And before any other lesson. We need to know that

HARD will come.

Jack Nicholson stated  in “A Few Good Men”…..”you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

This comes from one having learned.

You WANT HARD to come.

You NEED HARD to come.

If it does not come soon enough in life you will fail to learn its lessons for when you need the most.

That’s why sports and other disciplines are so good for us early in life. 

They bring us HARD.

And, if we have the best and correct instruction, we will know that HARD is something we must go through to ever be successful, valuable to others, and any good to ourselves.

Only if you have been through IT do you know.

And it is simply stated but difficultly done.

Overcome HARD.