Last week the COO of a European startup I’ve been working with sent me the bad news we had both been waiting on. After everything they had poured into the company, the investment they were counting on never came through. The board met and made the call. They're dissolving the company.

What do you do when everything you've built starts to come apart? When the client walks away. When the relationship fractures. When the children you've prayed for still haven't come. When life simply refuses to look the way you thought it would.

And underneath all of it, the harder question: what do you do when life is hard and God feels silent?

In those moments, the doubt creeps in. Did I hear God wrong? Did I miss the thing He had for me? What did I do wrong here?

Some of those questions are worth asking. But here's the reality we don't like to say out loud. We live in a broken world. Things go wrong. It isn't a matter of if. It's a matter of when something will break your heart.

And in the moment it feels darkest, when turning to God feels the hardest, that is exactly where we need to go.

Yet while this world is broken and suffering does come, God uses our suffering to shape us, to grow us, to move us toward the person He is making us to be.

There is purpose in it. And the God who allows it is not distant or impersonal. He is not asking you to walk through anything He hasn't walked through Himself. Jesus came, suffered, and endured the one thing none of us could survive: true separation from the Father, on our behalf. He did it so that in the middle of our pain we can come to the Creator of the universe and cry out, "God, where are you?" and know that He is right there with us.

Think of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stepping into the fire. God was in the fire with them.

He is with you too.

I have found that the most effective way to endure through suffering is look back on all the times God has been faithful.

When the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground, the first thing they did on the other side was build an altar of stones. Not just for themselves. For their children, and their children's children, so that generations later someone could point at those stones and say, "That's where God was faithful."

I've started writing mine down. I remember God calling me to be baptized when I was a little boy. I remember His presence at beach camp, where I first took my faith seriously. I remember Him walking with me as I lost my grandparents and my mother. I remember my mother's faithfulness through cancer telling me she had never felt more loved by God than in her suffering. On the eve of my wife and I’s 10th wedding anniversary, I remember praying to God in year one wondering how we were going to survive. I remember Him preparing me before our house flooded, and providing for us through all of it.

We need those altars. Because hard times are coming, and we need to be reminded of the one who walks with us.

There's one more thing worth naming. God is actively working in our lives and one of those actions is pruning.

Pruning is the gardener cutting away what isn't part of the design. Sometimes He cuts away things that are genuinely good, because they aren't what He has in mind for you. It hurts. It looks ugly in the middle of it.

I have crepe myrtles in my yard, and cutting them back is my least favorite time of the year. They look terrible afterward. Bare. Stripped. But this is Florida, and it doesn't take long before they're sprouting again, greener and fuller than before.

God can take anything that looks ugly and make it healthy again. Better than it was.

So here's my challenge to you over the next couple of weeks.

Take some time and remember. Look back at the moments God showed up. Write them down.

What are the altar moments of your life, the ones you'd want to tell your children about?

And if you're in one of those dark seasons right now, trying to make sense of what God is doing in it, you don't have to sort it out alone. Reply to this email and tell me where you are. I read every one.

Father God,

I lift up those who read this newsletter today. Ask that you walk alongside them and that you encourage them as they navigate life storms. Let them anchor themselves in you. Let them seek you and be reminded of all of the times that you've been faithful. In your name, amen.

May you be Anchored in Christ!

Jacob Dyke - Executive Coach @ Anchor Coaching

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