I had something on my heart tonight, and I wanted to come on here and share it with you. I’ve been thinking a lot about pain lately and how that has helped shape my life. I think we can all agree that — pain sucks. I don’t think anyone in history has ever enjoyed going through painful things. That being said there is wonderful things that can develop through this pain.

If you look throughout history, most of the successful people you will ever find have lived through incredible pain. What sets them apart from everyone else though is that they made a decision to use their pain to create something beautiful out of it. Many people just sit in their pain and don’t move past it. Yesterday and today, I was really thinking about something I went through months ago that really broke me down. I was stuck in my hurt for a good while, but then I realized I didn’t want to stay in it and little by little I started to move past it. Now looking back at that event months after…I am very grateful for it because it helped shape me and make me a better person.

It doesn’t mean I loved that this situation happened or that I enjoyed it at all, but what it does mean is that I love who I have become because of it. I can also look back at other events in my life and how they also helped shape me. The things we go through can either break you or shape you. To be honest you may break before you can shape, but the main takeaway from this is not to stay stuck in the brokenness.

A good metaphor for this all is jewelry. A jewel is broken down from its original form to turn into a necklace, ring, charm, etc. It’s not the same as it once was, but every stage it went through in the creation process made it even more beautiful than it was before. We are the same as human beings. We come in this world pure as little babies, but as we grow up, we go through things that shape us and make us turn into something different. This doesn’t mean we are not still beautiful as when we were babies. We are just now shaped differently than when we were born.

We can then use what has molded and shaped us to create something very beautiful. We may not see it when we are going through certain things, but if we hold on long enough, we will see that everything we went through was part of this bigger picture. That these parts of our life could have been extremely difficult, but it was supposed to happen for a reason. Maybe the reason was to help you grow or maybe it was to help someone else who feels like you did. It’s no lie that pain sucks and that it blows that any of us have to go through it, but it can all be used for good.