Recently I’ve been reading Bryan Chappell’s Holiness By Grace with some gals from church. This week’s chapter discussed the grace of God in discipline - hardships, trials, failures. In it Chappell writes that God uses discipline to make us tender - soft toward Him, and soft toward others. Suffering is not only a means of learning to sympathize with others’ pain, but also a deeper way to know Jesus. As we experience even a fraction of the suffering He endured, we can marvel a little better that our God would suffer for us. Discipline should also make us hard — firm in our resolve, firmly clinging to what matters and lasts, loosening our grip of the world’s promises and pleasures, understanding by experience that they will not satisfy.

May we become tender…and firm.