Love Takes the Steeper Road

Erin Doom

Sep 24

5 min read

Updated: Sep 25

Rich Mullins, the mystery of vows, and what Choose Hard really means

Synaxis of All Saints of Alaska

Commemoration of the Holy Protomartyr and Equal to the Apostles Thekla

Anno Domini 2026, September 24

The steep road becomes walkable because we do not walk it alone.

Erin and Christiane Doom sitting on top of Pikes Peak

I HAD JUST finished writing an essay called “Hardship Is Not Podvig.”

It was a necessary clarification. Choose Hard is memorable, but memorable sayings are dangerous when separated from the world that gives them meaning. Choose Hard could be mistaken for a celebration of pain, an admiration for toughness, or a command to make life needlessly difficult. But that’s not what I mean by it.

Then I began listening to Rich Mullins’s second album, Pictures in the Sky. The anniversary of his death had fallen only a few days earlier, so I had begun working my way through his albums again. The second record’s opening song, “When You Love,” offered an unexpected companion to the essay I had just written.

“Hardship Is Not Podvig” explains what Choose Hard does not mean. Mullins’s song begins to show us what it does mean.

Love Makes the Road Steeper

The song begins with prayer, singing, and the private hopes shared between lovers who rest securely within a lasting promise. But the promise doesn’t make their road easier. It gives them the security necessary to walk a more demanding one. That’s one of the mysteries of a vow.

A vow gives rest because something has been settled. It closes the door on endless reconsideration. I no longer wake up each morning wondering whether I will remain faithful to my wife or whether I will continue following Christ. The decision has been made.

But that settled promise doesn’t flatten the road. Often it makes the road steeper. Once escape is removed as the default response, love must learn how to forgive, endure, listen, repent, and begin again.

A vow interrupts biography. It prevents every passing emotion from becoming the author of the next chapter. That’s not the glorification of hardship. It’s the liberation of love from the tyranny of convenience.

The Christian does not choose the steeper path because steepness is holy. The Christian chooses love. And sometimes love takes the steeper path. That difference is everything.

Sometimes we imagine love as the removal of difficulty. We hope that the right relationship, the right community, or the right encounter with God will deliver us from the struggle. Certainly, love provides consolation. It shelters, comforts, forgives, and heals. But love also asks things of us.

A genuine commitment limits our freedom to abandon one another whenever remaining becomes inconvenient. Yet this binding is not the enemy of freedom. It may be the condition that makes a deeper freedom possible.

The person who continually preserves every option can never fully give himself to anything. He remains free to leave, but he never becomes free to love. Love calls us onto a steeper path because love asks us to become the kind of people who can remain faithful upon it.

The earlier essay makes the essential distinction: hardship is something difficult that happens to us; podvig is the faithful response we offer within it. Mullins adds something equally important. The faithfulness of that response is not measured by how much it hurts. It is measured by love.

The Rest Hidden Inside the Work

The line that captivated me most in Mullins’s song concerns a kind of rest discovered within work rather than sleep. That seems contradictory—but only until we consider how exhausting it is to live divided against ourselves.

There is certainly a fatigue created by labor. But there is another fatigue created by resistance: resisting the truth, resisting our vocation, resisting the people we have promised to love, or resisting the next small act of obedience because we’d rather imagine a grander one.

Sometimes we’re tired because we’ve worked hard. Sometimes we’re tired because we’ve spent all day refusing the work given to us.

The rest Mullins describes is not inactivity. It’s the rest of an integrated life. It comes when our attention, desire, body, and will begin moving in the same direction. The labor may remain demanding, but we are no longer exhausting ourselves through continual evasion.

The vow that makes the road steeper also makes this rest possible. Because the central decision has been made, we are freed from having to renegotiate our lives every morning. We can give our strength to the work of loving rather than spending it preserving an escape.

This, too, belongs to podvig. Choose Hard does not mean choosing the most painful option. It means refusing to let comfort make the decision for us. Love must make the decision.

When love calls us to labor, we labor. When love calls us to rest, we rest. When love calls us to speak, we speak. When love requires silence, we become quiet enough to listen. The difficulty is not the point. Faithfulness is.

When Hard Times Become Good Times

Near the end of the song, Mullins imagines the possibility of looking back and recognizing goodness in years that were undeniably hard. That’s not the same as declaring hardship good.

A loss remains a loss, and an illness remains an illness. We don’t have to rename evil in order to confess the providence of God. Christian hope makes a more astonishing claim: hardship does not possess the power to determine the final meaning of our lives.

Love can enter what was painful and refuse to let it be wasted. Grace can work within circumstances God did not delight in and that we did not choose. Years later, we may look back and discover that the hard days were also days in which we were loved, sustained, corrected, and slowly formed.

The days were not good because they were hard. They were good because God was present. This is the difference between romanticizing suffering and giving thanks within it. We don’t thank God that evil is evil. We thank Him because evil did not succeed in separating us from His love.

Choose Love

Perhaps Choose Hard needs always to be heard beneath a larger command: Choose love.

Love does not always make the road easier. Sometimes it asks us to relinquish comfort, resentment, pride, and the freedom to leave. But it also gives the difficult road a destination. The hardship is not the good; love is the good toward which we continue walking.

Rich Mullins does not leave us with a technique for mastering hard times. He gives us something better: a vision of a life in which prayer becomes song, rest strengthens us for work, service becomes freedom, and the steep road becomes walkable because we don’t walk it alone.

The question is not merely whether we are willing to choose something hard.

The question is whether we love enough to choose what faithfulness requires.