Living With Both Joy and Sorrow is Living Full

 

In this world we have sorrow.

In this world we experience joy.

I once really struggled with how to live with both. How can I smile when I am hurting, physically or emotionally or both?

How can I say I am well when I'm not?

I thought I had to choose until I couldn't.  Because choosing meant that one reality needed to be discarded in lieu of the one I chose. Choosing one negated the other and both were very much a reality.

That's when I discovered the peace of living with both at the same time. And I realized both can coexist together. Both can be held with an equal right to be present and living with both made my life full.

Full of today.

Full of the presence of Jesus. 

Full spectrum of life's emotions. 

I can sing and cry.

I can laugh and mourn.

Picture with me one of those surveys that have a line and on one end there's the number one and on the other is the number ten.  One end says needs improvement and the other says excellent. You are supposed to rate the product you purchased or the experience you had. 

It captures and gives place to rate the spectrum of one's experience. 

So it is with joy and sorrow, pain and healing, storms and sunshine... to live with one on one end and the other on the other end; you live with the full spectrum and a life that experiences a peace which passes understanding.  

To encompass both is really to encompass the full of life.

A visual that helped me tremendously is the posture of two hands... to hold out both of my hands.  In one is placed what is hard, what hurts, and what emotion I am feeling.  In the other is placed the Greater Truths of Jesus and my choice to believe Him and if I can't in the moment, I say I want to.  In this hand is placed the choice to trust and in faith, stay with Jesus.  Then either lift them both up as an offering of praise or fold them together in a prayer for strength, for eyes to see Him, and a heart to trust.

For Jesus was fully man and fully God.  He came as an infant, born of a woman, life, flesh and blood, with feelings.  And yet, He embodies full divinity.  It's a mystery and a paradox that is the way of Jesus still today.  His ways are beyond ours but to live with both/and is to live fully alive in Him.

To experience pain is to know and experience healing.

To know disappointment is to realize there is hope.

To experience loss opens the way for comfort.

To know darkness is to experience the gift of light.

To be dead spiritually is to realize and experience the gift of our Saviour, Jesus and His life.

So the wrestle continues not in a new way of believing Him, but in a way each time something happens to choose Him again.  To choose to stay with Him, now, today and to find Him again in this both/and.