Life is hard, and it frequently hurts — whether or not we are Christians.

(We eclipse that fact, you know — many Christians act as if, because they know the story of Jesus and read about Him in the Bible, they do not experience the same negative emotions as the rest of the world. But Jesus never promised to take away our problems — if that were the case, then the percent of people in the world who become Christians would approach the number 100.)

While we wait — and it seems like we spend a lot of time doing this — we are not alone. It is in these waiting times that we grow, imperceptibly, into different and better people. Lady in Waiting, original oil painting by Steve Henderson; licensed print at iCanvasART, Framed Canvas Art, and Amazon.com.

In our lives, beset with challenges and pain, it is easy, remarkably easy, to look around us and wonder if we are the only people, on the planet, to live with our specific set of circumstances and problems.

In some ways, we are, but in other ways, despite the unique aspects of our issues, we are not:

Regardless of what we are going through, regardless of the exclusively uncommon particulars of our predicament, some things are very much the same, and in common with all humans’ experience:

We feel anxiety, fear, uncertainty, dread, sadness, impatience, despair. It doesn’t matter if we are ill, or if we have lost our job, or our house burned down — the feelings associated with grief, shock, and worry are common to all of us, and at the very least, we can be (oddly) comforted in knowing that we have not been singled out from the rest of humanity.

In other ways, however, what we are going through is uniquely our own, and too often that can feel very lonely. Other people may have experienced something similar to our situation, but not with our uniquely customized details, so the happy ending that works for them, isn’t something we look for in our own life.

Be of good hope, however, because no matter how alone we feel, God never abandons us, and that is what I discuss in today’s Commonsense Christianity post at BeliefNet, Are You the Only One Going Through What You Are Going Through?