The Only Way Out Is Through

You cannot escape 'hard' but you can go through it

Barge Haulers on the Volga, Ilya Repin, c. 1873

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
- If, Rudyard Kipling

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Every difficulty presents a choice: out or through.

School gets hard. Work gets hard. Training gets hard. Holding to your convictions gets hard. Marriage gets hard. Friendship gets hard. Church gets hard. Parenting gets hard.

And, in different ways, you will be asked (by yourself or by others): out or through?

Do you leave? Do you give up the project? Do you compromise?

As children of the technological age, we are strangers in a strange land here. Our entire economy is premised on salvation from ‘hard.’ Think of those terrible infomercials where the poor woman’s arms are full of a menagerie of tupperware containers and mismatched lids. She hoists her load up to the cupboard, only to have everything tumble back on her head, a cacophony of rubberized despair. Suddenly, the black-and-white screen is zapped with color, and the same woman is seen neatly snapping fourteen containers inside of each other and breezily putting them away. *shing* She smiles. “It’s that easy.”

Microwaves, robot vacuums, grocery deliveries, Cocomelon, store bought pie, self-driving cars, google search, “Buy Now with One Click,” athleisure, express wash, YouTube fireplace, teledoc appointments, audiobooks, “thumbs up” text replies, “Hey Siri,” online tutorials, disposable plates, TL;DR, pre-wrapped presents, and information as vast and glittering as the Seven Seas at our fingertips—all of it is there to make life convenient, easy, comfortable. The apocalyptic promises/threats of AI are premised on the erasure of difficulty. Why would we drain our rivers and lakes to power the rectangular cement-warts of data centers? Why put brutalist blocks the size of Manhattan in the middle of Wyoming? Because ChatGPT makes things easy. From coding to writing emails to sifting through data…or your own feelings and getting life advice. AI will give you what you want; you’ll be able to do more, faster, and easier!

Life today is synonymous with convenience. And all of it, like so many threads in the magician’s scarf, hides the obvious from view. Life is hard. And no technological messiahs will ever, ever, ever be able to deliver us from it.

I’m grateful for many technological innovations we have. I am grateful for the computer I am writing these thoughts out on. But I am aware of how the material circumstances of my culture have imprinted something deep in my lizard-brain: I should not have to do hard things. I am certain that every human being in every age would feel exasperated trying to get a key off an overly tight key-ring, tie a wiggling toddler’s shoes, or navigate a phone call with a health insurance company…but I think I feel it uniquely. I, who have been given titan-like powers through my iPhone and computer, can find it more plausible than any other previous generation that the material world should bow to my will.

It doesn’t, of course. But it feels like it should. When most of my life is spent sinking digital nails seamlessly into digital boards, it feels mildly outrageous when a real one bends crooked.

But you can’t escape crooked, not in this warped world.

What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. - Eccl 1:15

Not Out, But Through

When life gets hard, the escape hatch of “out” usually is a mirage. If you flee from your marriage because you can’t see a way through, you will not be stepping out of “hard” into “easy.” You will be just stepping into a different kind of “hard.” A life with an imperfect marriage is hard. But so is a divorce. You can’t escape hard. And if you are in a situation where the Bible permits divorce, that may be the only option you have. But—and this is point here—there is no way to escape hard. Don’t get a divorce because you think it will be like the tupperware commercial. It won’t.

We technocrats assume that we are like helicopter pilots in life. We can go where we want, when we want, as fast as we want. The Bible humbles us. Life is more like a train ride. We are on a track we cannot change, going to a destination we cannot alter, moving at a speed we did not set.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” - James 4:13-15

You did not determine when, where, and to whom you were born. You have control over vanishingly little in life. And you do not know when you will die. When Ecclesiastes speaks about our “lot” in life (Eccl 3:22; 5:18-20; 9:9), the assumption is that there are parameters set for us, but not by us.

And the question we are to ask ourselves as we receive the “lot” the Lord has given—the good and the bad—is not how to escape it, but how to walk through it with wisdom.

Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil? - Job 2:10

But if you inhabit the same culture I do, that means that you will have to push against an impulse. That inner voice that tells you things shouldn’t be hard, is not the voice of wisdom. When that mood begins to rise in you as you deal with the thorns and thistles of this world, ask yourself: Why do I think that? Where did that idea come from? Qualifications are needed, of course—the teenager being sexually violated at boarding school does not need a stiff upper lip and brave face, he needs to leave. But most of the time that is not the case. Most of the time the impulse to start looking for a new job, new town, new church is a rejection of the sanctifying friction of difficulty God has intended for our good.

Just because something is hard does not necessarily mean it is good. But neither is it inherently bad. In fact, it may be the path to what is good.

Robert Frost

The phrase “the only way out is through” comes from Robert Frost’s 1915 poem, “A Servant to Servants.” It is a rambling complaint from a woman who is exasperated by her lot in life. She is bitter and resentful at the menial labor she must daily perform and wishes she was more unencumbered, more free. But her husband, who is burdened himself with an enormous amount of work, reminds her: “the best way out is always through.” But there are three ways to respond to that idea:

Escape

Seek a way of escape whenever the desire arrives. This is our culture’s M.O. And it is a lie. You cannot escape hard, but you can ruin a whole lot in that futile attempt.

Resignation

This is the wife’s response in the poem. She agrees with her husband, but what she means is: “I agree to that, or in so far as that I can see no way out but through.” Later she sighs, “I ‘spose I’ve got to go the road I’m going: Other folks have to, and why shouldn’t I?” She does not have the optimism of technological-man to escape her hard life. Her lot has been set for her, there is no way out, only through. But she has no hope in the midst of it. Life will be crushing, so she becomes bitter.

Hope

This is the Christian response. The lines have fallen for us in pleasant places, even when they seem to angle towards suffering, towards “hard.” Even towards death. Hope is the supernatural belief that behind a frowning providence, God hides a smiling face.

Jesus explains that discipleship to His ways is death-shaped. Take up your cross and follow me. Paul knew this: “I die daily…For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake…Put to death what is earthly in you.”¹ If we abide by Jesus’ commands we will be on a path to death, dying along the way. But resurrection life will suffuse our dying, and will explode in fullness when death comes. It’s the design. There is no way out of this. This is the path Jesus walked first, and on the other side of the cross is an empty tomb. When Jesus prayed for a way out of that path in Gethsemane, He resigned Himself to the certainty that the only way out was through—through pain, shame, death, and hell, but with the hope that He would emerge on the other side into glorious light. That’s the pattern of our life. A dress rehearsal for the day when we reach our own graves.

When Bunyan’s Pilgrim arrives at “The Hill of Difficulty”—symbolizing the self-denial and endurance needed for the Christian to face the trials of life, he sings out:

This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend.
For I perceive the way to life lies here.
Come, pluck up, heart; let’s neither faint nor fear.
Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.

1. 1 Cor 15:31; 2 Cor 4:11; Col 3:5