This excerpt is from a spiritual direction I had with my Aunt Betty when I was going through a tough time. Her words are below in red:
When you go through these difficult times, pray, “Lord, help me to be faithful and to grow in trust and faith, and give you a chance to help us. Be the strength that I’m not at this time. You’re my hope. I need you to be what I’m not. Be the fidelity in me that I’m not. “
God can still win in the end. Everything’s not over. When you’re in tight spots, you have to pray in earnest to get out of them. Don’t give up. Pray all the harder.
Ask the saints to share their faith with you, when they went through rough times. Stand in the strength of your faith to get through times like this. We can’t always hear when we are in dark places. Ask for help to get back into the light. God won’t permit anything to happen to us that won’t be for our good.
Sometimes when a situation isn’t improving, it’s because we need to pray more. It’s one way to get our attention. When going through hard times, it’s a good indicator we need to pray harder, because there’s no way to get out of the mess without God. We’re in spiritual warfare similar to soldiers on the field.
Hold up your disappointments. Pray, “God, you can bring good out of anything, so we put our trust in You. There are no accidents with you.” God is working on you in your pride. Hand your pride over to Him, so He can complete whatever healing it is.
Greater Freedom 
I wonder if, as my mother always told me, “you cannot change others but can only change yourself.” She spoke these words from a very secular vantage point. So I wonder, when we go thru super tough times, we can try to change things around us, but we cannot rely on our ability to actually change things for the better. I always wonder, is this situation even supposed to change? If God allows it, perhaps I’m just supposed to suck it up and feel it, grow from it, suffer and learn from it. It is very hard, esp when we are surrounded by others and the media who seem to tell us that we CAN and should be able to change things for the better and thus become happier people. It’s such a quandary of the cross.
LikeLiked by 1 person