"Joy and Sorrow: an Unavoidable Reality" - Leah Kate King

Have you ever noticed how God is the God of opposing realities? The God who turns bad things to good, restores what breaks and takes, and can hold two things so different in one hand as we await His final return. Joy and sorrow are one of those realities.

Joy and sorrow are two words most wouldn’t see as fitting together like a puzzle in this life with Christ. How could they? Isn’t life with Christ absent of sorrow? Oh goodness, don’t we want that. But the reality is life will always have sorrow. We live in a world tainted by sin not absent of it. The only good we find in this life is because of God not the absence of Him for He is goodness itself.

I had always grown-up hearing that joy and sorrow could co-exist but it was not until my 30s that I began to truly realize that I was living in the reality of it. It’s not that I had not gone through really challenging things the first 30ish years of my life either. I had, but that’s details for another time.

In my early 30s the Lord has led me into what felt like a depth of grief I had never tasted. I was not depressed. I was not drowning for lack of hope. Life just held a grief that I had not tasted to the extent that this was. It was grief from the sting of death. Though the Lord met me in that space with intimacy and community, what I found was I needed more Jesus. As I grew in clinging to Jesus, I realized that my whole life the Bible had been filled with verse upon verse of what I was experiencing. Not a descriptive “how to” get through this. But an explanation of what I was experiencing and how He was going to meet me there in the sorrow, why it mattered, and how joy was the natural response.

This last couple of years I had clung to the reality that joy and sorrow must coexist like that. As I walked through this last year, I found myself holding on to Jesus in a way that I had never before. I lost my brother and though it was expected, what wasn’t expected was that I would feel such deep grief and still experience so much joy. Sometimes that feels like whip lash and sometimes I fear people thinking it is fake. But as I walked this last year with the Lord I got to live in the reality that “if God is with us in the valley (Psalm 23:4) and if in His presence there really is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11), then the reality of joy that eventually brings about light to the eyes must be possible. Now that isn’t saying there is not a place for deep grief and a type of lament that is even seen in the sorrow carried so heavily that our eyes can’t even open, but that doesn’t mean joy is not there. Because if the Scriptures are true it has to be as long as God is true to His promise to be near to the broken hearted and with us.

We read in Psalm 23 that the Lord is with us in the valley and in Psalm 16:11 that in His presence we find fullness of joy. I never understood how those realities worked together but one day the Lord began over time to highlight scripture such as Psalm 34:18 where we are told He is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit. It’s not a remedy that means sadness goes away but its a reality that the mighty presence of the Lord in a person’s life keeps them going. When the Lord is present, true joy is present. Therefore, in this life joy and sorrow must coexist for the believer. If they didn’t we wouldd no longer be in this world.

Now I know what you are thinking, “okay Pepe Le Pew, great for you but that’s not my reality” and I get that. Trust me. It’s rare that we are sad and study one verse or say one prayer then suddenly our hearts are bursting with overflowing joy. But that’s not the kind of joy I am talking about. I am talking about the deep seeded peace partnered with hope and trust in the Lord that allows you to look up with a heavy heart and weak eyes and say “I don’t get this, but He is still good.” It’s the kind of joy that is produced in a like a perfectly tense guitar string as the old hymn says, “let it be a sweet, sweet sound in Your ear”. A joy and sorrow that when coexisting has a way of causing a tension that cries out a hallelujah that only those who know it can cry out.

I think we often do not believe joy and sorrow can coexist because we have a wrong understanding of what joy is. Its not being happy all the time but rather knowing there is more to the story because as long as Christ is Lord there is more for the story to be redeemed.

“You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound. In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”