On Sorrow and Joy

Dec. 3, 2018.  We'd have been married 40 years today.  I've had feelings like a yo-yo going up and down this month. Crazy how you can feel an anniversary even before you connect with the date.  I found myself feeling such a mixture of feelings, and a heaviness. Weighed down by the sorrow of a loss for me and for my kids.

It begins for me in November.  I found myself writing, "Sorrow and joy play hide and seek around my heart." I was too busy to be able to even process the words.

November 2nd carries in on her wings the joy of my sweetheart's birthday- a day of holy exchange. He shares it with the death date of my Dad.  Dad ran his race with an amazing work ethic, courage, commitment to his church, and family, generosity, and love. Dad loved me in his brokenness best he could, never stopped missing Mom, his bride of 63 years or his son, Vanda. Dad suffered the worst humiliation for him of not being able to work and to be independent in his last years. For Dad, it is truly a graduation into a place where he has now entered into the JOY that our Lord has for him and the fulness of His LOVE. 

And celebrating my new love. Eric, who reflects much of my dad's greatness in courage, integrity, generosity, love for and dedication to his family, but very different in areas where I had long felt a lonely void.  Eric who lives out a deep commitment to God.  Eric, who has been through the breaking of his heart and his body, has fearlessly sought the recovery needed to heal both. And encompassed in his gifts of generosity, he has given comfort, his presence, honor, and so much more to me.

It moves into Thanksgiving, being with grandkids and the birthday of my late husband, Dave.   The void searching for gifts just right for him. The void of him.  And now today. I hurt for him. I hurt for the tragic death, and sometimes destructive lifetime of struggles and brokenness. I hurt most of all for the fallout, like the destruction of an atom bomb that his brokenness and eventual suicide left on all around him, especially my children.

Mary was chosen to bear Emmanuel-God's very Son. Blessed with great joy, but mingled with the eventual piercing of her heart with a sword. It seems in this life we all partake of that journey to some degree or another. I woke with the song above ringing through my head this past week.

It's funny, as I write this, that I just realized why this morning the scripture that jumped out at me in my reading seemed totally unrelated to the sorrow I was feeling this morning. I wrote it down anyway, without a heart, because I knew it was from Him. But as I get to the end of processing why I'm feeling what I feel, I see the connection.

 It was Isaiah 65:22-23. It was the answer of my prayers for my children and grandchildren; for Dave's children and grandchildren. 

 It was:

"No longer will they build houses and others live in them,

    or plant and others eat.

For as the days of a tree,

    so will be the days of my people;

my chosen ones will long enjoy

    the work of their hands.

23 They will not labor in vain,

    nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;

for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,

    they and their descendants with them."

 In the midst of joy, there can be sorrow. In the midst of sorrow, joy.  In the waiting, the experiential knowledge of that  joy that comes in the morning as surely as the dawn.  In grieving comes comfort. And in the wake of it all comes resurrection.
 Only through HIs breath, His presence. Only through the perfect LOVER of my soul.