Sad in Happy Places

Sometimes I get sad in happy places.  Sometimes it's a sad that comes a few days before I leave a place I love.  Sometimes it's a sad that comes during a wedding or conversation about love stories (which I love) because I haven't had my own yet.  This is entirely inconvenient for several reasons. 

1. I do not like being sad, because when I am sad, I start to like being sad.  This sounds like gibberish born out of my week of little sleep, but let me explain.  Being the dramatic, occasionally sentimental and idealistic person that I am, sometimes I think sad is a romantic garret on a grey and rainy day, or a desolate plain windswept and desperate in its openness.  Sometimes I forget that sad is an emotional response to something, and that's ok, but you need to be sad for a suitable amount of processing time and then return to un-sad.

2. Being sad in a happy place means that you can't enjoy the happy place, and by gum, what's the point of being in a happy place if you can't enjoy it! 

We are never promised that we will always be offered a detour to avoid being sad.  What we are promised is we will never go alone.  Sometimes I forget that.  I still get tricked thinking that people who follow Jesus are handed a get out of jail free card and can rest assured that sadness or human loneliness will never be a part of life. 

Even an ability to cognitively process events so they make sense and seem rational can't save us from disappointments or grief.  He died because the oncogenes were triggered and the cancer took over.  The car crashed because the wheels slipped on black ice.  We can make sense of things, but that doesn't take away the intense emotion attached to them. 

Our hope is in Jesus, and in that we rest.  Sometimes it is the dreamless, sweet sleep of a newborn, and sometimes it is the desperate rest of a man who has just latched on to a floating piece of flotsam tossed in the waves of a shipwreck.  The rest is no less present, just of a different nature.   

When I chose the word "fight" for this year, I did so with the bravado of someone who has forgotten the difficulty of the battle.  It sounds like a nice word, its intent is victory, but inherent in the word is the presence of an enemy.  The victor might rise, but with maimed limbs and bloodied face.  With the fight, there is a cost that accompanies the victory.  Not all things can be taken along to the battle.  Selfishness and pride must be laid by the way, and fierce independence must be replaced with community.  The fight for joy and relationships and contentment will have none of self-centeredness. 

Jesus said, "follow me".  He didn't say where or through what, just "follow" and that his presence is a promise.  

Little Miss Sunshine