“This is kind of what we do,” I explained with a smile, “not much has changed.”

They weren’t the first neighbor I’d fed this response to, and it wasn’t the first time I doubted my own words.

I thought we’d be good at this. As the world around us shut down and everyone shut in, I thought we’d just keep on keeping on. “We already homeschool,” I’d explain to those asking how we were doing, “and we run a couple of businesses from home.” I would think about the two months we lived in a twenty-foot travel trailer while exploring the Pacific North West with three-going-on-four children and a dog. Tight spaces were our jam. Yes, we’d be good at this.

Only I was wrong. It wasn’t until one evening a few weeks in, when through tears I confessed to my husband, “Actually, I’m not ok,” that I finally began feeling a little bit ok. While it’s true that our lifestyle prepared us for many of these forced adaptations, I wasn’t prepared for all the change and challenge I could not see. The less visible hardships.

I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of thoughts that would divide my normally focused mind.

I wasn’t prepared for the dissapointment in my childrens’ eyes at each new realization.

I wasn’t prepared to face the reality of just how dependent I am on routine, consistency, and normalcy, or to realize how tightly my responses and attitudes were tied to these dependencies.

I wasn’t prepared to grieve.

This week I see it first in my boy. I walk into his room, he sits slunk over his bed. Sent to think over his wrong actions toward his brothers…. again.

“This isn’t you,” I told him minutes ago. “You’re not a bully. You’re not mean. I want you to spend time thinking about what’s causing you to not act like yourself.” I left him with that assignment, and now with puffy eyes he calls me back with his answer.

“I think I know what is making me act like not myself,” he fights to gather his words, “It’s just sometimes, I want to do one thing but my mind keeps doing the other thing.”

We talk about an apostle, years ago, who spoke of the very same struggle, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Paul wrote in Romans 7:15. We talk of Jesus’ finished work, how He has saved us completely, and God says we are holy, but while we walk this broken world, we will struggle with our sin nature. I tell him I still struggle in my mind against sin, too, and daddy does. We all do. But Jesus gives us power and victory, and that’s what we fight to live in each day. He gives us the strength to choose another way.

The words take a couple of days to steep in my own mind, to convince me they were more for me than my son. I begin to see just how many of my weaknesses this time is exposing. I’m being rubbed raw, and it’s uncomfortable, humiliating, humbling.

A few days later I read in Romans, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” We’re all doing some sifting of hope lately, searching for what will remain when all is stripped away, and here it is…. hope. But, produced by character? I can’t begin to understand how my character would bring about hope only God can offer. My character, after all, has been found full of holes. And so it must not be me. It must be Him. It’s not my character which He is polishing, it’s His character inside me. These hardships strip me away of me, of my sinful self and old ways that Jesus died for. He refines us through each hard moment, producing in us a godly character which opens our hearts to grasp a true, steadfast hope that we could not see through the haze of self.

This is the painful process He asks me to walk through.

He’s asking it of my son, too.

He’s asking it of each of His followers.

Let me not stand up on the other side of trial and speak the same words I rehearsed to my neighbors weeks ago… “not much has changed.”

No, let there be a trail of evidence, a path scattered with dross. Let there be endurance, character, and hope marking the other side. If I narrow my gaze, I can see it now.