We attempt to engineer a world where sadness and despair just don’t have a place. And then one day sadness-a sense of loss- runs a red light and hits us broadside. The Christmas story tells us we are wired for relationships. So why are we shocked when memories of relationships gladden or sadden us? Relational loss accounts for a lot of sadness and depression. Thirty percent of all suicides come at the time of a loss of a love relationship.
Maybe it’s helpful to say that most sadness is not clinical depression. Neither is it despair or hopelessness. It is just sadness triggered by memories of things that weren’t the way they were supposed to be or a departed beloved family member. Sadness is normally part of an emotionally sane, healthy, loving life. Sadness emotionally connects us with loved ones and our common wounds and frustrations. Sadness does not mean anything is wrong with us. Sadness simply refuses to live in denial or delusion. “Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Sadness is part of God loving through us now.
We are sometimes surprised to discover that sadness and joy run along together arm in arm in the middle of our lives. By faith we know the joy of the Lord will outlast all sadness because both joy and sadness are inside Hope. Hope is “the confident expectation that God will complete what he has done in us.” Hope, a fruit of the Spirit in us, leans us forward-pulling us into the future of the God who raises the dead. Hope will ultimately wipe away all tears, but, sadness now is still real because we live in the “not yet” of the kingdom coming in glory to destroy death.
All of us who mourn are created divine image bearers, fearfully and wonderfully made children of God, who often suffer from too little conversation, too little touch, no friends sitting together, no one helping us put a word on the sadness. So let’s sit together; not trying to cheer each other up. That is burdensome and unfruitful. Just being present with each other says without words “You belong with us when you are sad. Your feelings do not measure the Presence in your life. There is no condemnation in Christ on the days you feel like it is true and the days you do not.”
“Blessed are they who mourn for they shall be comforted.”