The strange pattern of progress

Today at A Holy Experience Jon Bloom writes:

Think about this strange pattern that occurs over and over in just about every area of life:

Healthy, nutritious food often requires discipline to prepare and eat while junk food is convenient, tasty, and addictive.
Keeping the body healthy and strong requires frequent deliberate discomfort while it only takes moderate indulgence to go to pot.
You have to make yourself pick up that nourishing but intellectually challenging book while flipping on the TV or popping in a DVD is as easy as coasting downhill.
You frequently have to force yourself to get to devotions and prayer while sleeping in or cleaning that clutter or checking Facebook just has a gravitational pull.
Learning to skillfully play beautiful music requires thousands of hours of tedious practice.
Excelling in a sport requires monotonous drills ad nauseum.
Learning to write well requires writing, writing, writing and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. And usually voluminous reading.
It takes years and years of schooling just to make certain vocational opportunities possible.

You get the idea.

The pattern in everything is this: the greater joys are obtained through struggle and difficulty and pain—things you must force yourself to do when you don’t feel like it—while brief, unsatisfying, and often destructive joys are as inviting as couch cushions.

Why is this?

Because God, in great mercy, is showing us everywhere, in things that are just shadows of heavenly realities, that there is great reward for those who struggle through and persevere (Hebrews 10:32–35).

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