No one tells you how deep the paradox of Christianity runs. That it is a river, warm at the top and icy cold to the bones underneath, a bracing shock of reality and truth and also a powerful current that tumbles you at times into the deepest sadness and confusion.
There are so many “true, and also true” pieces of faith. Faith, and works. Christ fully God, and fully Man. Strength made perfect in weakness. Christ a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to us who are being saved the power and the wisdom of God. Run the race, yet nothing can snatch you from the Father’s hand. The first shall be last and the last first. His power made perfect in weakness.
But the deepest of all these paradoxes is God - and sorrow. He who created goodness, who is the very essence of goodness in His being - yet stays His hand over and over when it comes to protecting His people from the hazards and sorrows of life. Lore Ferguson Wilbert talks about this in her latest post.
I’m no stranger to hopes deferred. I’ve curled in the fetal position more times than I know weeping at the dreams that have trickled through my hands. Exes who married other girls, babies I felt flush out of me in a rush of blood and water, jobs that promised everything and withheld it all, friendships that never materialized the way I hoped, car trouble that knocked out my entire savings account in one moment, and so, so, so, so much more.
I told a friend this week (whose current trial is one that will likely last the rest of her life): “God doesn’t protect us from Life itself.”
Yet despite this - I find that as much as grief returns to me and to friends I love over and over - so does joy. That it’s very hard for a Christian’s heart to break in a way that there isn’t also, eventually, some joy - and joy cracks us open, fragile and eggshell, as hard as sorrow does. How often in this life have you felt that bittersweet brimming over of deep sorrow and a thread of intense hope and joy, at the same time?
That is the mystery of Christ. So it is to exist - to live and move and have our being in a creation that groans and labors with the pangs of childbirth. A reality stricken, smitten, and afflicted with sin - shot through with wonder, but where few things are as they should be. “So we groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:22).
Lore finishes her post by saying -
“But my heart is learning that love trumps disappointment. I have learned and am learning that though disappointment tinges my story, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
And E.M. Welcher, an online acquaintance, talks in his latest sermon about grief, and having a heart full of sorrow mixed with a Joy that cannot be taken away -
Meaning, I think, that grief is this burden you carry near your heart, which you know is there, even if the rest of the world doesn’t know what you’re going through, like a mouse , or a thief in the dark.
2nd Corinthians 4:7-10 “we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body”
Before [my wife and I] met one another we had already found the goodness of the Lord in that land of the living in Jesus Christ Himself…
Build your life on the rock of Jesus Christ, He is the firm foundational joy which nobody can take from you. Dig your roots deep in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Build your identity on the peerless, incorruptible joy of Christ. He shall never forsake you.
-sermon “Grief like a Mouse, Joy like a Phoenix”
Faith meets sorrow, when it first comes or when we are young in faith or life, with a clash and a boom that shudders the realities of our whole lives.
But later, silver and calm, there’s an odd peace that can wrap us in its folds - the peace perhaps mostly, of knowing the future. And of knowing Christ. There’s a light that shines dimly through the shadows in the eyes of older Christians I know who have walked with God a long time. It’s the light of seeing dimly now - Lord, why suffering?? - yet knowing one day we’ll see face to face. And we’ll “know fully then” (1 Cor 3:10). We’ll know why suffering - and we’ll also know Christ.
Soli deo gloria.