Where There Is Struggle, There Is Hope
By Dr. Keith M. Waggoner | 35 Years of Coaching Men & Women to Lead, Fight, and Win
Every person in the world… who has lived very long at all… has had their heart broken.
Think about what has broken your heart the most right now. Go ahead… pause and think.
You already know where your mind goes. A name. A moment. A season that rewired something in you permanently. Maybe it was betrayal. The slow kind… where you kept making excuses for someone until the day you finally couldn’t. Maybe it was a marriage that bled out quietly while you were busy building everything else. Maybe it was the morning you looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize what was looking back at you.
Stay there. Breath…
You can feel it? I sure can.
Stick with me… the journey into that pain will be worth it.
Can you see it? Can you be there now?
Breath again…
I’ve been hurt… I’ve struggled… But I also have Hope.
Please allow me to say this… I’m so sorry you’ve been hurt… But we all have haven’t we.
And as hard as this is to sit with… I wanted you to conjure it back up so if nothing else you can consider that pain probably served a purpose in your life you couldn’t see at the time. C.S. Lewis wrote that pain is God’s megaphone. The one signal loud enough to cut through all the noise we use to stay numb. It strips away the comfortable lies. It shows you what you were actually leaning on… and whether it could hold when everything came apart.
Most people never slow down long enough to let that land. So the pain just sits there. Quietly running the show for years.
But there’s something this means that really matters if you will allow it to sink in…
Where there is Pain… There is Struggle. And when people struggle it’s because they still have hope.
Hope in relief that is coming. Hope in a better season of life. Hope that it will all be worth it when…
You’ll have to fill in that blank with what you hope for and even put your hope in.
* * *
Even the Most Successful Men You Know Are Fighting Something
I coach people every day. For over thirty-five years I have pushed men to grow, to lead, and to build lives that actually mean something.
CEOs. Entrepreneurs. Athletes. Senators. Fathers. Mothers… People who run companies, carry enormous responsibility, and walk into any room commanding respect.
And behind that… they are fighting things most people never see.
What surprises them is not the struggle.
It is what they decide the struggle means.
They start to think that if they were really strong… really grounded… really walking in faith… life would not feel this hard. The tension starts to feel like failure. The resistance starts to feel like proof they took a wrong turn somewhere.
That belief will quietly destroy a man.
Because it turns him against the very thing that is trying to shape him.
| “Wherever there is struggle, there is hope.” |
Read that again slowly.
Wherever there is struggle… there is hope.
A man who has truly given up does not wrestle anymore. He does not feel that pull between what is easy and what is right. He adjusts. He settles. He builds a life that demands nothing from him… and over time the fight just leaves him. Quietly. The way a fire goes out when nobody tends it.
The struggle is not your problem.
Walking away from it is.
So if you are still fighting… if something in you refuses to stay where you are… if you feel that burn when you drift toward what you know is beneath you…
That is evidence of hope.
Proof that God is still working in you.
* * *
Real Faith Wrestles
There is a version of faith being sold right now that is essentially spiritual anesthesia. Say the right words, show up to the right places… and life smooths out. The struggle fades. Everything gets easier.
That is not the faith of the Bible.
Jacob did not meet God in a comfortable moment. He met Him at the bottom of the worst night of his life. Alone. Terrified. Facing a confrontation with his estranged brother the next morning that he believed might get him killed. In the middle of all of that… he wrestled. All night. He did not let go.
When it was over, he walked with a limp.
But he also walked away with a new name… and a blessing that defined the rest of his life.
Some of you are carrying marks right now.
Scars from addiction.
Scars from choices you cannot undo.
Scars from trying to obey when everything in you wanted to quit.
Those marks do not disqualify you.
They prove you were in the fight. If there are no holes in your shield… you were never in one.
What the Research Says About Fighting Back
I teach women’s self-defense. Have for years.
The research is overwhelming and consistent. Women who resist… who fight back, scream, scratch, run, refuse to go quietly… are far less likely to be harmed than those who go passive. The National Institute of Justice puts resistance at over an 80% reduction in completed assault. One program tracked 231 real street attacks on trained graduates. Their students won 224 of them. Of the women who physically fought back, about 40% caused the attacker to turn and run on the spot.
Most predators are not looking for a battle. They are looking for compliance. The moment you resist… the moment you make it harder than they planned… most of them run.
The fight itself changes the outcome.
Just a scream. Just the refusal to go quietly… The willingness to struggle… you see… Gives Hope.
What World War II Proved About Fear and Fighting
I have spent years coaching Texas Rangers and elite military operators. Men who work in environments where one wrong decision ends everything. And one of the things I have watched repeatedly in those rooms and on those mats… is that the men who perform under pressure are not the men who had no fear.
They were the men who moved and trained and then fought anyway.
They asked WWII veterans who made it home what it was like. They told every interviewer they were terrified. Standing on a beach at Normandy. Pushing through a frozen forest at the Bulge. Climbing out of a foxhole with bullets cutting the air around them.
“Were you afraid?”
Every single one of them said yes. Of course they were.
And then almost every one of them said the same thing next…
“Once we started moving… I didn’t have time to be scared anymore.”
Combat psychologists documented this during the war itself. A man is paralyzed by fear in the waiting. In the silence before the charge. In the space between the order and the first step forward. But the moment he moves… the moment he commits to the fight… something shifts. The fear doesn’t disappear. It gets overtaken. He is too focused, too in it, too committed to the next ten feet in front of him to let the fear own him anymore.
One soldier described it this way. When he was actually in the fight, moving, doing something… the fear lifted. It was only when the action stopped and the waiting started again that the terror came flooding back.
The fighting itself produced the courage.
Not the other way around.
| They didn’t win the war because they weren’t afraid. They won because they kept charging anyway. |
This is what defeated the greatest military machine the world had ever seen. Not superior numbers at the start. Not the absence of fear. America and the Allies won because ordinary men kept moving forward when everything in them screamed to stop. They kept fighting when it cost them everything. They kept going when there was no guarantee of anything except that stopping meant losing.
Wherever there is struggle, there is hope.
They proved it on every beach, in every forest, in every frozen field across Europe and the Pacific.
And Hawkeye said it plainly in The Last of the Mohicans… standing in the middle of an impossible situation, looking at the woman he loved with everything falling apart around them…
| “If we don’t go, there’s no chance. None.” |
As long as you are still willing to fight… you are still in the fight… and there is a chance… There is HOPE!
The moment you stop struggling, trying, fighting… there is none.
The Man Who Fought in Silence for a Decade
A former college athlete came to me years after his playing days ended. On the outside, decent life. Good job. Nice house. People who respected him. On the inside, he had been losing a slow war with alcohol for ten years. No blowup. No arrest. Just a quiet drift… one drink at a time… deeper and deeper… until the bottle was running his schedule.
He had been sober eight months when we first sat down. He carried those months like they were something to be ashamed of. Like the fight itself proved how far he had fallen.
“I should not have needed to fight this hard,” he said.
I pushed back on that hard.
“Eight months means you chose right every single day. You don’t get eight months by accident. You get it the same way those soldiers got through Normandy… one step at a time, scared out of your mind, choosing to move anyway.”
He went quiet for a long time after that.
The scar was not his shame.
It was his record of the fight.
* * *
There Is a Voice That Will Use Every Scar Against You
You already know this voice.
It runs the highlight reel of your worst moments at 2am with perfect clarity. Every mistake. Every failure. Every time you said you were done and went back anyway. It takes all of it and turns it into a verdict. Same verdict every time…
You are not who you should be. You will never be. You might as well stop trying.
That is not the voice of God.
Christ talked about taking up a cross. That is not a metaphor for mild inconvenience. That is a call to carry something that costs you and keep walking anyway. Every man who has done the hard right thing when the easy wrong thing was sitting right there… knows exactly what that weight feels like.
Sobriety is not light.
Faithfulness is not light.
Integrity… the kind you practice alone when nobody is watching and nobody will ever know… is not light.
Paul knew this firsthand. In 2 Corinthians he describes a thorn that stayed with him. Painful. Persistent. He asked God to remove it. More than once. The answer that came back was not relief.
| “My grace is sufficient for you.” — 2 Corinthians 12:9 |
So Paul kept going.
Thorn and all. Pressure and all. With the fight still right in front of him.
That is not a man who had it figured out. That is a man who refused to stop.
* * *
This Is Your Moment to Decide
The struggle is not your excuse to go back.
It is your moment to decide.
Fight.
Fight for your faith.
Fight for your sobriety.
Fight for your faithfulness.
Fight for your marriage… your integrity… the man your kids are quietly deciding you are.
Fight with something that outlasts emotion. Fight with structure. Fight with discipline. Fight by closing the doors that keep pulling you back. Delete what needs to be deleted. Walk away from what owns you. Put yourself in rooms that push you forward. Get out of the ones that drag you under. Make the calls you have been avoiding. Build habits that hold on the days when you have nothing left. Those days are the ones that actually build something.
The cost of not fighting is always higher than the cost of staying in it.
That contractor came back a few weeks after our hardest session. He had made real changes. You could see it before he said a word. Something in the way he carried himself.
“I hate how hard this is,” he said.
“I know,” I told him. “Keep going.”
He did.
Two years later, his wife called me. First time she ever reached out directly. She said it was the first time in a decade she felt like she had her husband back.
One choice. Then another. Then another. That is how a man gets his life back.
| Easy… or right. That tension is where everything gets decided. |
* * *
Hope Is Where the Fight Begins
A man will fight for what he believes is still possible.
When hope goes dark… watch what happens. His shoulders drop. His eyes go flat. He stops making plans and starts managing decline. Hope is not a soft thing. It is structural. Pull it out and everything built on top of it comes down.
Viktor Frankl came out of Nazi concentration camps with this observation burned into him: the men who survived were not always the biggest or the toughest. They were the ones who held onto a reason. Something to move toward. A purpose just far enough ahead to keep taking the next step.
Hope is not wishful thinking.
Hope is what keeps a man moving when everything around him is arguing for quitting.
If you are reading this… there is hope.
If you woke up this morning… there is hope.
If your heart is beating and your lungs are still pulling in air… something in you has not given up.
That matters more than you realize right now.
* * *
Hope Moves Into Faith. Faith Shows Up in How You Actually Live.
Hebrews defines faith as substance. Something lived and visible. It shows up in the choices you make when nobody is watching, in the habits you build when motivation ran out months ago, in the direction you take when the pressure is high and the easier path is right there.
You hope.
You believe.
You act.
Real change lives in that last word. In the unglamorous, daily decision to keep moving when every part of you doesn’t want to.
And then something deeper starts growing.
Love.
1 Corinthians puts it above everything. Above faith. Above hope. Above every gift and every sacrifice. The greatest of all things is love.
So here is the question that cuts right to the bone…
What do you actually love?
Look at what you return to when nobody is making you. What you protect. What you celebrate when you are alone. What you go back to when the pressure gets high enough.
That will tell you more about your life than anything you say out loud.
Some men say they want freedom… but they keep walking back into the same rooms that are destroying them. In the part of themselves they don’t show anybody… they know exactly what they are doing.
That is conflict.
And conflict means the fight is still on.
* * *
Three Questions. Answer Them Honestly.
What do you hope in?
What do you have faith in?
What do you rejoice in?
Answer those… not for me, not for anyone else… and you will know exactly where you are. And exactly what needs to change.
| “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus Christ and His righteousness.” |
That holds when everything else shakes.
Your performance will fail you. Your past will be used against you. The version of yourself you worked so hard to hold together will crack under enough pressure.
But He doesn’t.
Struggle is not leaving your life. As long as you are chasing something that actually matters… it will show up. It will press on you, expose you, and force you to decide who you are going to be when it would be far easier to become someone else.
When it shows up… recognize it.
Wherever there is struggle, there is hope.
And where there is hope… there is still a fight left in you.
* * *
Go back to where we started.
That moment that broke your heart. That season that rewired you. That place that still carries weight when you let yourself think about it.
That is not the end of your story.
It is part of what is shaping you.
The question is no longer whether the struggle is there.
The question is what you are going to do with it.
Are you going to keep fighting… keep struggling??? I sure HOPE so.
Live Life ALIVE!!!
Dr. Keith M. Waggoner