The other day I was listening to the song “Beautiful Disaster” by Jon McLaughlin and reflecting. It was 11:30 at night, I was missing my best friend who just moved to California (I live in Ohio), I had Lacrosse practice at 6:15am the next morning, and I was miserable. This song came on the radio and I couldn’t help but really take the words to heart.

“She would change everything for happy ever after.”

Woah. In a flash I was back at my old house, the house I grew up in until I was 18 years old, the house that filled the early part of my short life with smiles and laughs, but the latter part with tears and painful memories of anger and brokenness. And those lyrics rang deep in my ears.

What I would have changed for happy ever after.

But upon further reflection, I pulled myself back to reality. Are we not the product of our experiences? Should I be wishing away the events in my life that shaped me to be the person that I am today?

No, and neither should you.

And you know what this means, right? It means that we toe a difficult line between embracing our suffering, and letting it define who we are.

Because although I no longer wish I had lived a different life, I sometimes let my struggles define me.

But I am not the sum of my or anyone else’s failures.

Did you hear me? If not, let me repeat myself: your self worth should not be measured by what you have gone through. The Lord does not allow suffering so that we can make it our identity.

And believe me, this can be a struggle. But if we let our sin and our struggle define who we are, dictate how we think of ourselves and identify with the Father, then soon enough we will build up a wall of bitterness.

We were not called to be bitter. The Lord did not allow us to overcome suffering so that we could allow ourselves to be defined by it.

When I was 15 my parents divorced. And it wasn’t pretty. As a product of this, we continued to suffer from tragedy after tragedy for the next three years. I walked away from that part of my life barely hanging on by a thread.When I came to Franciscan I felt I had seen and dealt with more than anyone my age could ever dream of going through. I walked around with this heir of entitlement – I had suffered, and nobody understood.

It was at that point that I had allowed myself to prolong that suffering. I refused to let it go – I wanted to live in it. I had no idea what it was like to be free, so I clung so tightly to the one thing I had known for so long – pain and suffering.

And this is exactly the reason that we must break free from this attitude.

I want to challenge each one of you reading this – if this is something that resonates – seek freedom. And don’t just seek it in a superficial way. Really go out of your way to ask the Father to free you from this bondage.

Because choosing to exist in the darkness is no way to live, when you could step into the light.