What does it mean to count the cost?

Really. Think about it for half a second before you keep reading.

What does growth cost? What does self-control and discipline cost? What do relationships and love cost?

What does it say to another when you’re only willing to invest low effort communication and an invulnerable persona that refuses to be harmed by potentially feeling dumb or looking silly?

How do others make whatever behavior you’re witnessing look so easy? The reality is, it’s not.

To love at all is to be vulnerable and you never know how bad you are until you try to be good, according to C.S. Lewis.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, according to G.K. Chesterton.

If fortune favors the brave and the bold, and poverty encroaches upon the soul of those who seek a little sleep and a little slumber and a little folding of the hands to rest, it’s going to take some effort lest we be pulled down into the locker with the rest of the scurvy laden souls of the damned.

We can’t run from effort, lest we be overcome by the waves and pulled out into the water to drown. Since there is so much on the line with our ease and difficulty, our pride and humility, the cadence of this issue will shift into an abnormal staccato.

It’s easy to take the wide path, with gentle slopes and rolling paths without signs or markers. The long, savory second glance. The unmitigated eye contact. The unsacrificed thought nurtured and caressed until its shaped into a precious vision of a cracked cistern that will never slake our thirsts.

What’s easy?

Not changing. Not turning. Harboring bitterness and resentment. Growing cold. Loving your bed. Getting offended. Reacting. Only talking about what you want to do. The silent treatment. Doomscrolling. Floating in the current of life’s lazy river. Buying more stuff. Snacking. Being afraid and entertaining our fears. Giving up. Letting go. A whole host of other things.

Here I write about the proverbial fight with Poseidon. Way back in the first issues, I wrote about how our fight is with the Enemy in the Fog, the three cords of Poseidon: dark spiritual powers, external and proximal influences and pressures, and the internal battle with ourselves.

What are things that are difficult?

It’s difficult to pick yourself up, find your footing, and get going again after a choice to fall.

It’s difficult to not look at your phone first thing in the morning.

It’s difficult to get out of the rut you’ve been stuck in for years.

It’s difficult to start again once you’ve stopped.

It’s difficult to live in a cage of your own making.

It’s difficult to not be selfish.

It’s difficult to train your soul, your mind, your body, your desires, your passions, and your loves.

It’s difficult go to work. It’s difficult to till the ground or man the sails or instruct the youth or get anyone else bought into your ideas and direction. It’s difficult to develop emotional intelligence. It’s difficult to operate in a system that is managed by the numbers but you know the most important things can’t be measured, or at the very least managed, by metrics and data points. It’s difficult to be given responsibility over something you received no training on. It’s difficult to learn what everyone else’s strengths are and work together as a team instead of each individual being the measuring stick of every other individual. It’s difficult to work outside in the elements and give your body to physical labor to be broken for those you love. It’s difficult to work in the suffocating heat of the summer and the bone chilling cold of the winter but you keep showing up anyway because you have to. It’s difficult to say no. It’s difficult to resist getting sucked into commitments you know you don’t have the time or capacity for. It’s difficult to have people depend on you.

It’s difficult to be in control of your money instead of your money being in control of you. It’s difficult to own your stuff and not let your stuff own you. It’s difficult to spend money when you want to be saving and it’s difficult to save money when you want to spend it. It’s difficult to be in debt. It’s difficult to come up with a plan to get out of debt and even more difficult to stick to it.

It’s difficult to exercise. It’s difficult to build new routines. It’s difficult to hike up mountains or go camping in the woods. It’s difficult not to eat snacks for comfort when you’ve found refuge in eating for so long. It’s difficult to get out of bed, to run a mile, to ruck for two, or to keep a consistent routine to finally be able to do 100 pushups or sit ups in one shot. It’s difficult to give up caffeine and it’s difficult to go through withdrawal headaches. It’s difficult to eat what’s good for you, especially when your tastes have been trained in salt and sugar and simple carbohydrates. It’s difficult to trust nutrition advice because everything kills you, even the healthy food which has recalls on it for E. coli contamination. It’s difficult to garden and grow your own food.

It’s difficult to cut through the constant noise of the internet. It’s difficult to be still. It’s difficult to slow down. It’s difficult to stop rewarding your brain with the dopamine hits from this ubiquitous device called a smart phone. It’s difficult to lay healthy boundaries when the most trustworthy researchers haven’t fully understood what the balance is.

It’s difficult to learn the rules of a game. It’s difficult to play a complicated game and it’s difficult to think about others and play a simpler game when you’d rather play a complicated one. It’s difficult to play a game when you don’t like them but the ones you love see it as a way of building connection. It’s difficult to not take it personally when people just don’t like games. It’s difficult to find others and carve out the time for intentional game nights, and it’s difficult to keep loving others when you have major operational differences, outlooks, and opinions. It’s difficult to remember playing games is more about the connection than it is about the competitive win, but it’s also difficult to not throw your hands and say it’s all just for fun anyway because a lot of the fun and excitement comes out of the direct competition. It’s difficult to train your body for a sport or activity, especially when it’s something new and you don’t have any coordination for it.

It’s difficult read books. It’s difficult to finish one of the several books you’re two chapters into. It’s difficult to focus on the words of a page when it’s so much easier to lose an hour doomscrolling than to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out what the poet is talking about. It’s difficult to give your attention to something that doesn’t keep up with the optimized algorithms of content that’s on blast. It’s difficult to read the classics. It’s difficult to finish the book you’ve been plodding by along with for so long it feels like you should just give up.

It’s difficult to be sick. It’s difficult to have your body rebel against your will. It’s difficult to feel the sands of time slowly slip by. It’s difficult to live with chronic, unrelenting illness that never lets up or gives a reprieve. It’s difficult to live in a new normal and forgetting what it feels like to be healthy. It’s difficult to live in a fog where you’ve become dependent on medicine. It’s difficult to choose between symptoms or side effects. It’s difficult to accept that our life has a winter. It’s difficult to grieve loss when someone’s life ends in its spring or summer. It’s difficult to acknowledge that everyone will die once, some will die twice, and our first time is coming soon. It’s difficult when we avoid death so much that we forget to live with the days we’ve been given. It’s difficult to live like we’re not guaranteed tomorrow, and it’s difficult to live when you can’t see that this hug and kiss goodbye may be the last one you ever experience.

It’s difficult to have hard conversations. It’s difficult to tell someone they shouldn’t do what they’re currently doing. It’s difficult to tell someone their sin, which everyone has without exception, separates them from God and apart from trusting in Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins, they’ll remain separated from God and all His goodness and care and provision and love for eternity. It’s difficult to hear someone would rather choose their sin than God. It’s difficult to realize that sometimes you do that, too. Items difficult to live face to face with God and those closest to you. It’s difficult to open up and be vulnerable and to tell someone their actions hurt you. It’s difficult to try and see things from their side, even if you weren’t in the wrong. It’s difficult to care about how your actions made someone else feel when you’re more concerned about how you felt. It’s difficult to take ownership and accountability instead of making an excuse or shifting the blame to somebody else.

It’s difficult to homeschool your kids. It’s difficult to cut back to the point where you can homeschool your kids. It’s difficult to keep your home and life neat, organized, and tidy. It’s difficult to accept your house may be a mess and your things might get broken as the cost of living life. It’s difficult to live like things have a purpose beyond owning them. It’s difficult to keep a budget and not not impulsively buy things when the internet and apps have been engineered even better than grocery stores and casinos to keep you locked in and spending your money, all the while it remains your responsibility to not give in. It’s difficult to live within your means. It’s difficult to tell yourself no. It’s difficult to say no to those you love and would give anything for. It’s difficult to die to yourself.

It’s difficult to be accountable to someone. It’s difficult to keep that accountability and someone about the thing they wanted you to keep them accountable with. It’s difficult to fight the behaviors and action that, if left alone, will become ingrown and infected as the self growing upon the self. It’s difficult to plot a course and stay on it. It’s difficult to keep going. It’s difficult to never give up. It’s difficult to have joy in the midst of circumstances that dictate you should have none. It’s difficult to choose to have a good outlook. It’s difficult to admit you need help. It’s difficult to confess you’ve failed yet again. It’s difficult when someone makes an accusation against you to lay down your offense at how they said it and ask, “Is there any truth to what they said?” It’s difficult when their accusations line up with all the demons you’ve been fighting already.

It’s difficult when foxes make their way into your garden. It’s difficult to pour into a loving connection your spouse when you’re angry at them or haven’t eaten yet or are just plain tired from a long day. It’s difficult to be patient and kind. It’s difficult not to go to bed angry. It’s difficult to choose your wife or your husband if you’re keeping a record of their wrongs. It’s difficult to pursue emotional and physical intimacy with your spouse when feelings, whether the short onslaught of feelings from the day or battle hardened feelings built up like a fortress over the years, are driving your marriage instead of covenantal love for your spouse. It’s difficult to forgive what others have done or have not done. It’s difficult to avoid turning your marriage into a transactional hellscape where your mood is always dependent on the other person. It’s difficult to avoid becoming codependent or emotionally distant. It’s difficult to slow down when your spouse is ready to speed up, or to speed up when your spouse needs to slow down. It’s difficult to want to physically give yourself to your spouse because you’re thinking about how you can guard them against the temptations of the world. It’s difficult not to starve your spouse of the the goods you have because you’d rather horde yourself like a dragon hordes gold than give your body to your spouse in benevolent blessing. It’s difficult to draw near to someone who has pushed you away. It’s difficult to draw near when you feel the weight of guilt over how you acted. It’s difficult when your spouse confirms they are who you’ve been fighting with all the hope you can muster to believe that they are not. It’s difficult when those you aren’t married to treat you the way you wish your spouse would treat you. It’s difficult not keep score and a record of wrongs. It’s difficult to coordinate dreams, desires, and expectations. It’s difficult to dance together.

It’s difficult to reframe negative self-talk, bitterness, resentment, unbelief, and whatever other destructive narrative you’ve been ruminating on for God knows how long. It’s difficult speak truth to lies. It’s difficult to repent and turn around and go another way. It’s difficult to see where you’re going. It’s difficult to plot a course and make the decision not to go a thousand other directions. It’s difficult to commit. It’s difficult to not find identity in your sin, whether you’re currently unrepentant and practicing or you’re looking back on it with regret and vision that’s 20/20 in hindsight. It’s difficult to let go of your shame. It’s difficult to not let your past or your present define you, but to find who you are in being an adopted son or daughter of God, secured by the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. It’s difficult to forgive yourself even after God has.

It’s difficult read the Bible. It’s difficult to pray. It’s difficult to memorize Scripture. It’s difficult to fight for joy. It’s difficult have the Bible hidden deep in your heart so when some siren starts singing a temptation song, you can nip your response quick so that sweet song doesn’t lodge in your heart. It’s difficult to take your thoughts captive so they don’t take root. It’s difficult to stop the momentum towards anger, lust, envy, bitterness, coveting, or pride when you’ve been secretly nurturing those thoughts instead of slaying them. It’s difficult to believe that God is going to keep His promises when everything around you tells you He won’t. It’s difficult not to get cynical. It’s difficult to keep hoping. It’s difficult to not look at the circumstances that aren’t going your way or the people who have let you down once again and just throw your hands up to curse God and die.

It’s difficult to love your neighbor as yourself, let alone more than yourself.

It’s difficult to love God more than yourself.

It’s difficult to believe His words so much that you trust them more than you trust your own feelings, thoughts, experiences, and narratives. It’s difficult to walk in His wisdom that will be proven trustworthy as it’s been revealed in the Bible. It’s difficult to believe the gospel in that you’ve been made right with God, reconciled to the Father through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, when you look in the mirror and see that you’ve sinned yet again. It’s difficult to walk by faith and not by sight.

It’s difficult to love. It’s difficult to have joy. It’s difficult have peace. It’s difficult to have patience. It’s difficult to be kind. It’s difficult to be good. It’s difficult to have faith. It’s difficult to be gentle. It’s difficult to have self-control. It’s difficult to believe Paul’s letter to the Galatians that these are fruits of the Spirit at work in you. It’s difficult not to take all these difficulties and think that if only you do better and try harder, you can get a little better. It’s difficult to keep yourself from idols.

It’s difficult to have the work of the Spirit in you if your heart is hard against God. It’s difficult to be vertically right with God if you’re horizontally wrong with others around you. It’s difficult to be a part of a church, and serve in a church, and give money to a church, and build relationships in a church with people who have just as much jacked up life as you do but won’t talk about it because they only know imperfect love that has driven fear deeper instead of cast it out. It’s difficult to not walk away from God and His people. It’s difficult to check in when everything isn’t the way you want it to be. It’s difficult to lay down your life for someone you love, and it’s difficult to love them to start with.

It’s difficult to stay humble. It’s difficult to refrain from being self-righteous about how you embrace difficulty. It’s difficult to live strenuously. It’s difficult to have taken years of the easy route and path of least resistance only to look back with regret once you realize that the crucible of hardship still comes on the backend as you’re overcommitted and slower and more tired than when you didn’t lean into it on the front end in the days you had more time and energy.

It’s difficult to take the narrow path over the wide path.

It’s difficult to not give up. It’s difficult to keep going.

Every social media or online influencer will tell you how to live. The hardest part for me in that was taking their advice and trying to apply it to my situation, when they were giving advice from outside of my situation. I’ve felt lost and bewildered, unable to determine which was the best direction to go.

I don’t know what that’s like for you, and I wish I had someone to tell me in my most confusing days that their advice may not apply to my situation. Many days, I was a fool. Perhaps, I’ve learned something on the journey but that’s my journey. However, I do know that hardships are universal and none of us are above the experience of difficulty and suffering. I do know that everyone and their brother is trying to tell you how to live through the nuances of daily decisions and relationship interactions. Scripture does give us trustworthy imperatives, and we can see that they’re trustworthy by witnessing how peoples lives fall apart when they don’t walk by God’s wisdom. Walking by God’s wisdom is evident when people do not fall apart even though their world and relationships and health and finances and work and anything else collapses.

This is a hard line to walk and if we walk it on our own, we’re bound to fail. We’re bound to go astray. We’re bound to burn out and drown in the overwhelm. We truly are dependent on the work of God to establish the work of our hands and prosper our efforts. If we’re trying to do it on our own without seeking God in his glory that he deserves for being the provider of all good things, our efforts are in vain. What does it matter if we learn to run like horses if we’re only chasing the wind?

What about you?

What are the things you can easily drift into?

What difficulties are you facing that seem insurmountable?

What obstacle are you trying to have faith through?

Hit reply and let me know.

I know it’s hard. Don’t give up.

Maybe you already have. We’re well into 2026 now. How have you done with those resolutions and aspirations to be better than you were last year? Were they actual plans or misty hopes and dreams? If you’ve already crashed onto the rocks of difficulty and struggling not to give up in the face of resistance, feel free to revisit the practical helps for goal setting post from earlier this year.

In all these things, we need encouragement. We need others who will help us stay afloat. We need others to love us through the hardest and darkest times. It’s difficult not to lie to yourself.

When difficulty comes our way, and those we love and depend on fail us, which eventually they will, the Lord promises that He will never leave us or forsake us. (Hebrews 13:5)

Stay Anchored and keep fighting the good fight,

~ J.P. Simons ⚓️

PS: If you haven’t already ordered it, please check out my first book, Pray Then Plow: Practical Steps For Men Who Won’t Give Up. It’s difficult to format a book, which is why the paperback release is still TBD. I am working on it. Slowly.

A primary difficulty of assessing difficulties is our reactions to the difficult. We can polarizingly bounce off one ease to embrace the difficult when it’s really just a shadow side of the same coin. It is way too easy to get lost in the fog of love and war and affections and the future and the past.

All of these steps are accompanied by tempters who would see us collapse in defeat. To be alert is to embrace the difficult, to pray for and cultivate wisdom is difficult, to usefully say yes and no to the appropriate demands on our time and attention and allegiance is difficult.

The devil is a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. (1 Peter 5:8-9) That’s exactly what we get into with this week’s dive into the spiritual warfare with Wormwood’s affectionate uncle, Screwtape.