This week God has flooded me with joy and now I am joyful,
very abundantly joyful.
I am joyful because I have finally got into both my head AND
my heart what God was trying to tell me about embracing the sad parts of life.
I’ve finally realized that sometimes you’re going to hear something sad or see
something sad or think about something sad and that it’s okay to take time to
be sad about it.
Becoming a Christian doesn’t mean that God flips a switch
and all you are is happy and will never experience sadness again. In fact, as Christians, knowing the heart
that God has for the world, and seeing the state that our world is in, we
SHOULD be feeling sad.
BUT in the midst of our sadness, we feel HOPEFUL. Hopeful
because Jesus has overcome. But I think that a very necessary part of showing
the world around us the heart that their heavenly father has for them, includes
showing them how he feels about their suffering.
Romans 12:15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.
But I was afraid to be sad. A big part of the battle was
over control. I told myself, ‘You can be sad about these couple of things and
that’s it. Or you can only be this sad for this long.’ I wanted to protect my
tender heart.
I thought that if I started to be sad that I would never be
able to stop. After all,
Human trafficking generates 9.5 billion yearly in the U.S,
half of the world lives on less than 2.50 a day, and in the U.S domestic
violence occurs every nine seconds.
And how does one ever stop being sad about those kinds of
things?
But Jesus wept.
John 11:33
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”
Imagine being Mary or Martha watching Jesus weep. Imagine
how much love they must have felt for their savior, seeing how much He cares
for them. That the God of the universe would shed his tears for us.
My God is a God who feels deeply. Every day we are being
made more and more like our savior. And our God is a God who weeps over tragedy
and poverty and homelessness and abuse. And so we must be those kinds of people
too. People who have the same heart towards others that God has. God weeps with
me when I am hurting and I should weep with others that are hurting.
Once I finally completely embraced the sadness, the oddest
thing happened. I was filled with joy. Instead of being overwhelmed with
sadness like I feared I would be, I was so incredibly comforted by God.
He whispers to me, “Yes I understand. That is how I feel
about this too.”
I feel so much closer to God, finally grasping a bit of how
much He cares. I am filled now with so much joy and hope. Now I call it,
“hopeful crying.”
Embracing sorrow, finding joy. Doesn’t seem like it should
work that way. But that’s my God. He doesn’t operate the way the world does. Us
with our bumper sticker sayings such as, ‘don’t think about bad things that
happen, just focus on the positive.’
God works in ways that seem backward to us.
Ways like,
The first shall be last and the last shall be first
You must lose your life to find it
A man cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is born
again
From
an increase in allowing myself to be sad at sad things, the amount of hope I
had increased as well. The more acknowledgement of truth, the more hope that
God gives.
An increase in allowing myself to feel honest and deep
emotions, the closer I felt God’s presence, and the more hope and joy that
flooded my life. I realized that by refusing to acknowledge sorrow, I was also depriving myself of finding hope and joy in the midst of sorrow.
I want to practice ‘hopeful sadness,’ which is to greive
over sorrow and injustice and then hand that greif over to God and allow him to
hand back hope.
"Then you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free."
