Have you ever asked yourself, on a really hard, really bad day: “Why is G-d throwing all of this at me? Doesn’t he know I can’t handle it?” And you genuinely feel that way. You just can’t go on like this. What was G-d thinking?

If you do, you’re not alone. I feel that way, all the time. If you have never felt that way, stop reading this article and say ‘Baruch Hashem!’

So what to do about it? Let’s answer that with a parable. You and a friend are going skiing or tobogganing. It’s a massive hill, but, barely a third of the way up, you start to get tired and slip. You tell your friend, “Go on without me. I can’t.” You get on your sled and let it carry you to the bottom.  At the bottom, you land in a heap. Your friend is much higher up than you are. But you just don’t think you can do it. It takes a lot of effort to get to the top of the hill. And you just can’t make the satisfaction worth it.

I’m sure you know where this is going. It’s about when you have a bad, hard day, maybe even the hardest one in your life, in your opinion. Maybe one problem on its own isn’t so bad, but all of those things at once…“What does G-d want from me?! I can’t do this!!” Yeah, I feel that way.

We all have a mountain to climb in life. It will take a lot of training—and training hurts, right? People sweating and stretching their aching muscles in the gym aren’t always having the time of their lives.  But the higher you need to climb, the harder you gotta work.

We don’t know what mountains we have to climb. We don’t know how high our peak is. But G-d does. He prepares the training program. It really hurts. But G-d believes you can do it. The more you have planned in your life, the more good you can do, the more you have to handle the stress, pressure, and panic, and conquer them to become the best you can be.

And guess what? It’s not that suddenly, the troubles will be over, and you’ll zip to the top. Even now, during ‘training’ you are actively climbing higher- on the job practice. Going higher one baby step on the time. As you ‘train’, and get over one obstacle at a time, you are actively climbing.

So take a deep breath, a drink of water, and thank G-d. Because he believes in you. He knows you can handle this. He’s not going to let you wallow your life away being second rate. The higher to climb, the greater the reward, no matter if your top is higher or lower that anyone else’s.

G-d is the king of ‘tough love’. Embrace it. You have 127 years to become a person to be proud of. Use them.

And if it ever gets too hard- I’m always here to talk to. Really.