Are My Trials Really Trials?

We all play the comparison game to one degree or another. Whether it’s our financial situation, family life, physical appearance, or skill set, we all tend to measure ourselves against others. We even do this with our trials. Certainly, we do this when we look at someone with trials that seem insignificant compared to ours—“What gives!? Why is that person’s lot so much easier than mine?” But there’s another way Christians can do this that seems more humble.

Sometimes we look at those whose trials seem worse than ours and we discount the difficulty of our trials. We can perceive those who live in impoverished or war-torn parts of the world and think, “Life is so incredibly difficult there. I really don’t know what suffering is.” Or we can remember times in history when suffering seemed to be a way of life and think, “How can I ever think that life is hard?” We may look at those who have experienced loss or a life-threatening diagnosis and think, “My trials really aren’t trials.”

Surely, those scenarios are obvious examples of suffering. I don’t want to diminish that at all. But that does not mean your trials should not be deemed suffering. Consider this well-known text:

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4).

There’s one word I want to highlight in this text: various. How kind of God to include this word! He knows that trials come in all shapes and sizes. Trials don’t have to reach a certain degree of difficulty to be considered a trial. And what may be a trial to one person may not be a trial to another. One person may find a particular experience invigorating while another may find it petrifying.

We are all different people with different personalities. We have different strengths and weaknesses. We live in different places and have different pasts. As a result, we should expect our trials to be different too. This is why Elisabeth Elliot’s definition of suffering is so broad: “Suffering is having what you don’t want or wanting what you don’t have.” Our sister is on to something. Her definition leaves enough room for what we might consider a nuisance all the way up to what can be described as excruciating.

Now, keeping this in mind should not lead us to tolerate a “woe is me” outlook or a victim identity. This, surely, springs from self-focus. But a spacious definition of trials does the opposite, leading us to focus on God and live out of His grace as we trust His promises.

Practically, if you look at someone with what seems like an excruciating trial and you determine that your trial is not really a trial because it seems so small by comparison, then you will cut yourself off from God’s grace and joy. Meaning, you will do something like tell yourself to suck it up, since this is clearly something another person would say is nothing to bat an eyelash at. 

But if you have a “suck it up” mentality, thinking that your trials aren’t really trials because they’re not as hard as someone else’s, then you won’t see the need to apply God’s promises to your trouble. Instead, you'll try to buckle down and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. If you think you're successful at this, you'll become self-confident. If you think you're unsuccessful at this, then you’ll become self-pitying. Either way, God is not central, and you'll be spiritually weaker.

But if you turn to the Lord and apply His promises to your trouble, you get to experience His blessing. Think back to our text. You have to believe that your trouble fits into the category of “trials of various kinds” (verse 2) before you can believe that God is using that trouble to produce steadfastness in you and move you closer to complete spiritual maturity (verses 3–4). Only then can you “consider it all joy” (verse 2).

God wants us to trust Him in all our trials, no matter what degree of difficulty. It pleases Him when we believe that He is wielding each hardship as a tool of spiritual construction, even when that hardship seems trivial to others. Brothers and sisters, don’t neglect to label your trials as trials, so that God gets the glory, and you get the blessing of knowing that God is working fruitfully through your trouble. Don’t let this be another way that comparison steals the joy God has promised.