There is a deep-down bone weariness that comes with struggle.  The sheer weight of going on knowing that nothing we can do will change things as they are, that there is no going back to what was, exhaust the timbre of the soul.  We want to give up.  We want to quit.  We want to give in to the thing that has defeated us and die.  But the very fact that we do not succumb to the weariness of the impossible, that we endure, that we keep on keeping on touches into the hope of eternal justice, eternal good, everlasting possibility.  Then we see that our creating God who goes on creating—whatever the apparent failures of the process—asks the same of us.  When we refuse to give up, either on ourselves or on the world around us.  When we refuse to give up, either on ourselves or on the world around us, we become our own small sign that God is, that in the end right will prevail, that hope lives.  Endurance is the light of hope in a continuing darkness that must somehow, somewhere give way to the light of dawn.

-from Scarred by Struggle by Joan Chittister