Spring keeps threatening to arrive here and then pulling back. Cold mornings, warm afternoons, nothing you can rely on. I find I don't mind as much as I used to. I've gotten better at living inside uncertainty without needing it resolved.
Your question has been sitting with me: can something be good if it isn't worth wanting? Can we call courage under suffering a virtue while hoping we never need it?
Yes. And here's the distinction that makes it work.
You don't pray for the fire. You pray to be the kind of person who isn't broken by it. Those are entirely different requests.
I don't want illness. I don't want the hard seasons, the losses, the times when everything costs more than you thought you had. But if they come — and some of them will — then what I want is to move through them without losing myself. That wanting is real. It's worth praying for. The hardship isn't the good; the person you can become inside the hardship is.
Seneca's friend called an easy life undisturbed by fortune a Dead Sea. I've lived stretches like that. Comfortable, untested, a little flat. You don't grow in those stretches the way you grow when something actually demands something of you. That's not an argument for seeking suffering. It's an argument for not fearing it so completely that you arrange your whole life around its avoidance.
The virtues travel together — bravery, steadfastness, foresight, endurance. You don't get to deploy one while the others wait outside. Every genuine test calls the whole company.
Ask not to be spared. Ask to be ready. Those are the prayers that mean something.
I'm rooting for you to never need the harder kind of courage. And I'm rooting for you to have it anyway.
Yours, in all weathers —