How God prepares us for hard times is almost never obvious while it is happening. In fact, most of the time it looks like nothing at all. It looks like a job. A season. A few ordinary years you would not think to write down anywhere.
This week on the podcast, our guest Brittany Plourde told a story that has not left me alone since. You can hear it in Brittany's story, part two. But I want to sit with one piece of it here, because I believe somebody reading this needs it tonight.
EIGHT YEARS THAT LOOKED LIKE NOTHING
Brittany got a cancer diagnosis in 2018 and came through it. Then she went back to work and taught high school at a Christian school for the better part of eight years.
Ordinary years. Lesson plans and grading and the drive in. Furthermore, the people around her prayed together on Friday mornings, and the faculty talked about how to support their students, and none of that felt remarkable to her at the time. It was just her job.
Then in 2025 the second diagnosis came, and it was far more serious than the first.
And this is the sentence that stopped me. Looking back at that first diagnosis, Brittany said, "if this diagnosis had happened at that point, I don't even know if I'd be here."
She was not talking about medicine. She was talking about her faith. Those eight ordinary years were the thing that made her able to stand up under what came next.
HOW GOD PREPARES US FOR HARD TIMES - USUALLY WITHOUT TELLING US
Here is what I want you to notice, because it is the whole point.
Brittany was not in training. Nobody sat her down and said, " We have eight years; let us get you ready." She thought she was going to work. Meanwhile, God was quietly building something in her that she would need later and could not possibly have known to ask for.
That is the pattern, and Scripture is full of it. Joseph spent years in a prison before he was in a position to save his family. David was a shepherd long before he was a king. Moses kept sheep in the desert for forty years before a bush caught fire.
None of them knew what the preparation was for. Consequently, all of it looked like wasted time from the inside.
FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS
There is a moment in the book of Esther that says this better than I can.
Esther was a young Jewish woman who had ended up, through a chain of events she did not choose, as the queen of Persia. Then a decree went out that would have destroyed her people. And her cousin Mordecai sent her a message asking her to go to the king on their behalf — which, at that time, could have cost her life.
What he said to her is one of the great sentences in the Bible, located in Esther 4:14
"And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?" Esther 4:14 NIV
Read that carefully. Mordecai is not telling her the danger is not real. He is telling her that the position she is standing in was not an accident.
Brittany's royal position was a high school classroom. Nevertheless, it did exactly the same work.
THE SPEECH SHE WROTE FOR SOMEBODY ELSE
There is one detail in her story I cannot get past.
Two years before that second diagnosis, Brittany was asked to give the convocation speech at her school. She is an introvert with real stage fright, and she does not speak in public. However, she prayed about it and said yes anyway.
The speech she wrote was about how God asks us to do hard things — and about how it is in the hard that we grow.
She wrote it for her students. Two years later, she understood who it had really been for.
I do not think that was a coincidence, and neither does she.
HE WAS BEING KIND, NOT CRUEL
Now, I want to be careful here, because this is where a thought like this can go wrong.
I am not telling you that God hands out suffering in order to build character. And I am not telling you that every hard thing in your life has a tidy explanation waiting at the end of it. Some of you have lost people, and no sentence anybody writes on a website is going to tie that up neatly.
But here is what I do believe, and what Brittany's story shows plainly. He does not waste the ordinary years. Instead, He fills them. And when something finally comes that you could not have carried on your own, you discover you are not the person you were eight years ago.
That is not cruelty. That is a Father who is way out ahead of you.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE SEASON YOU ARE IN RIGHT NOW
So let me bring this all the way home to wherever you are sitting.
If you are in a stretch that feels ordinary — or worse, wasted — I would ask you to consider that you may be in the middle of the preparation and simply cannot see it yet. The Friday morning prayer group. The friend who keeps checking in. The book somebody handed you. The hard conversation you have been dreading.
Here is something practical you can do today. Take one ordinary thing in your life right now and ask Him plainly: what are You building in me with this? You may not get an answer this week. Nevertheless, the question changes how you walk through it.
And if you are already in the hard part — if the ordinary years are behind you and the thing you were being prepared for has arrived — then hear this. How God prepares us for hard times means the preparation is already in you. You are more ready than you feel.
YOU ARE NEVER ALONE
How God prepares us for hard times is one of the clearest signs I know that He is paying attention. He was there in the eight ordinary years. Above all, He is there in the hard one.
So no matter what you are facing on your journey with cancer or in life, remember this. You are NEVER ALONE. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are always with you and ready to help. All you have to do is ask, give it all to Jesus, and let Him go to work.
And if you do not have a relationship with Jesus — or if yours has gone stale, or weak, or you are just plain angry right now — I would strongly encourage you to visit our Accepting Jesus page. It will walk you through it and give you a prayer you can pray tonight, right where you are.
I would also love for you to hear Brittany tell this in her own words. Her second episode is live on our podcast now, and there is a third one coming that you are not going to want to miss.
May God bless you, and thank you so much for reading.
Listen to the Podcast - Brittany's Story, Part Two - You Can't Put a Timestamp On My Life