Afflictions come dressed in many garments
sometimes in coarse burlap,
sometimes in silk woven with quiet dread.
They arrive uninvited,
sitting at the foot of your bed
like an old storyteller
waiting for you to finally ask,
What have you come to make of me?
For suffering is never passive.
It is a sculptor with trembling patience,
a blacksmith with a furnace that never sleeps.
It holds your soul in its palms,
studying its contours,
deciding whether to refine you into brilliance
or shred you into fragments
too weary to rise again.
And you
you must choose your posture
before it lays its hand upon you.
Sometimes affliction feels like a long corridor
with no lamps,
no windows,
only the echoes of your own breath
reminding you that you are still alive,
even when you wish you weren’t.
It pulls at the loose threads of your courage,
testing whether you will unravel
or tighten your weave
and emerge stronger than you entered.
There are days it whispers,
softly, deceitfully:
Lay down your hope.
Let despair cradle you.
And if you listen long enough,
you will feel your soul folding inward,
growing small,
becoming a shadow of the person
you were meant to be.
But if, by rare and stubborn grace
you lift your chin
and look affliction in the eye,
you discover it is also a rare tutor,
unyielding yet strangely gentle
to the one who stands firm.
Its fires burn, yes,
but they burn away illusions,
not identity.
They scorch the pride,
but they spare the essence.
They refine the edges
where fear once hid,
and polish the corners
where possibilities slept.
Affliction is the paradox of becoming:
it can hollow you
or make you holy.
It can grind your will into dust
or turn your grief into gold.
It all depends on whether your heart
meets it with clenched fists
or open palms.
For some, it is the night wind
that extinguishes the fragile flame
of self-belief.
For others, it is the same wind
that teaches the flame to lean,
to stretch,
to dance with resilience
rather than collapse in the dark.
And so it is with every soul:
we are either shattered
or shaped.
We are either thorns
or thrones.
We either crumble
or crystallize.
Affliction stands silently in the doorway
holding both outcomes in its hands,
waiting for you to choose
Will you dissolve under its weight?
Or will you rise,
forged and fierce,
bearing the gleam
of one who has walked through fire
and learned to speak its language?
And someday,
when you look back
at the wounds that once threatened
to unmake you,
you will see
they were not merely scars,
but signatures of transformation.
Proof that you did not merely endure,
but emerged refined,
expanded,
and undeniably alive.
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