Hardship Is Not Podvig

Erin Doom

Sep 22

5 min read

Updated: Sep 25

The Faithful Response to What We Did Not Choose

Commemoration of St. Phocas the Gardener

Anno Domini 2026, September 22

NOT LONG after I published “Choose Hard: One Year at Moore Water,” a reader wrote to express concern. He suggested that I was mistaking economic oppression for Christian formation. In other words, by describing what had begun to happen in me during a year of working two jobs, he believed I was baptizing the burden itself. He gently reminded me that Christ calls the weary to rest, that His yoke is easy and His burden light, and that the way of the Kingdom is repentance and service.

It’s a serious objection, and I don’t take it lightly. The fact is that Christianity has sometimes been used in exactly this way: to persuade suffering people to accept what should be resisted, to spiritualize injustice, and to call avoidable misery the will of God.

So let me be clear: hardship is not Podvig.

Pain is not inherently holy. Exhaustion is not a sacrament. Poverty, illness, grief, trauma—or any other imaginable type of suffering or hardship—do not automatically make someone wiser or more like Christ.

Suffering can deepen compassion. But it can also produce bitterness, addiction, deception, resentment, and despair.

What Happens and How We Respond

Difficulty alone does not form us. What matters is not only what happens to us, but how we respond to what has happened. That is the distinction that lies at the heart of Podvig:

Hardship is what happens to us.
Podvig is how we faithfully respond.
Transformation comes through grace and cooperation, not pain alone.

I did choose to leave Eighth Day Institute after years of burnout and financial unsustainability. That decision was mine. But I did not choose what followed: the unemployment that came after my departure from UPS or the financial pressure that continued to build. I would never prescribe working two jobs, running on too little sleep, and struggling to support one’s family as a spiritual program.

Those things aren’t good just because they are hard. But once they became part of my life, I still had choices to make.

Would I become bitter or grateful? Would I hide or tell the truth? Would I refuse work I considered beneath me, or receive the work available to me? Would I blame everyone else for what had happened, or accept responsibility for the next faithful step? Would I allow suffering to make me cruel, or continue learning to love my family, my customers, my coworkers, and the people whose packages I delivered to their doors before sunrise?

Those choices are where Podvig begins.

Podvig does not call evil good. It asks what faithfulness requires in the presence of what is not good.

Podvig and Repentance

Podvig is not a replacement for repentance. Nor is it a misunderstanding of repentance.

Podvig is repentance practiced with the body. It is embodied repentance.

Repentance isn’t merely a feeling of remorse or a change of opinion. It’s a 180-degree turn—a turning of the whole person toward God. That turn acquires concrete form through prayer, fasting, confession, almsgiving, watchfulness, service, forgiveness, and the repeated refusal of the passions.

Repentance says, “I have been walking in the wrong direction.” Podvig takes the next step in the right one.

We don’t earn grace through effort. But grace doesn’t eliminate human participation. God acts, and we respond. He calls, and we arise. He gives strength, and we begin again.

Again and again.

The Easy Yoke Is Still a Yoke

Christ does call the weary and burdened to Himself. He does give rest. His yoke is easy and His burden is light. But He still gives us a yoke.

The same Christ tells us to enter through the narrow gate, deny ourselves, take up the Cross, serve the least, forgive our enemies, and lose our lives in order to find them.

The Christian life isn’t difficult because pain is virtuous. It’s difficult because love asks us to surrender the false self we’ve spent years protecting.

Christ’s burden is light because we no longer carry it alone. His yoke is good because it joins us to Him and directs our strength toward love.

Christian rest is not the absence of all labor. Even before sin entered the garden, Adam and Eve were given work to do. They were called to tend and keep the garden.

Christian rest—or leisure in the richer sense developed by Josef Pieper—is not an escape from meaningful work. It’s the end of laboring without meaning, without communion, and without hope.

Sometimes the Hard Choice Is to Stop

“Choose Hard” doesn’t always mean work longer, lift more, endure silently, or remain where you are being harmed.

Sometimes the hard and faithful choice is to rest. Sometimes it requires asking for help. Sometimes it means admitting that you can’t continue. Sometimes it involves leaving an abusive situation, establishing a boundary, receiving treatment, confessing a lie, or allowing someone else to carry you.

Podvig cannot be reduced to toughness. It’s not a religious version of grinding harder.

The question is not simply, “Which choice hurts more?”

The question is, “Which choice turns me toward the Good?”

What I Meant by Choosing Hard

When I wrote about my year at Moore Water, I wasn’t celebrating a system in which a man can work two jobs and still struggle to support his family. I was bearing witness to what happened when the life I had known broke apart and I had to decide how I would meet the life that remained.

The hardship didn’t form Christ in me simply because it was hard and painful.

If any formation occurred, it came through the grace that met me there—and through the small acts of cooperation that grace made possible: getting out of bed, going to work, telling the truth, serving people, accepting correction, resisting resentment, returning to prayer, loving my family, and beginning again and again after repeated failures.

The suffering was not the teacher by itself. Christ was the teacher. The hardship became a classroom only because He did not abandon me inside it.

Choose the Good

Podvig doesn’t peddle the belief that difficulty in and of itself is good. Instead, it’s the willing practice of turning toward the Good within any given difficulty.

We don’t choose hard because hard things are holy.

Think of it like this instead:

We choose prayer when distraction is easier.
We choose truth when hiding is easier.
We choose forgiveness when resentment is easier.
We choose responsibility when blame is easier.
We choose rest when pride demands that we prove ourselves.
We choose love when love costs us something.

“Choose Hard” is shorthand. It can be misunderstood, and therefore it must always be completed: Choose the hard thing when the hard thing is the faithful thing.

Choose the Good.

Behold it. Practice it. And by grace, become what you were created to be.