Entering into the Joy of Others
LISA UPDIKE | GUEST Ecclesiastes 3 tells us that there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven, a blessed ebb and flow of challenge and loss, peace and rest. Joy and sadness. Births and deaths. Serving and receiving. And though we intellectually understand that we will have trouble in life, it still can catch us off guard. When the time of trouble persists, we cry out like the psalmist did, “How long, Lord?” We wonder, “Does the Lord even see me?” If we are in a particularly long, hard season we may wonder why the Lord is richly blessing others and not us. Well, at least that’s what I do. My guess is that I am not alone. For the past several years my life has been really hard, sometimes heartbreakingly so. Two of my children are going through some painful circumstances causing distance between us. My heart aches over our difficult relationship. In another sphere of life, my mother is aging and often in pain. She is lonely for my dad whom she lost five years ago to Alzheimer’s. It’s so painful to see her suffer, though she does so with grace. On top of these things, this past fall we were blindsided with grief when my husband’s youngest brother took his life. We had no warning. So. Much. Grief. And I hate to say it, but there is a lot more to this list. I’m telling you; my husband and I have been hurting. A lot. Still, we were hanging in there. We were growing and learning to cling to Jesus. But then there was just one more tragedy and it tipped the balance. It seemed more than we could bear. Was God actually kicking me when I was already down? I knew better, but at 4:30am when the phone rang, I knew it couldn’t be good news. My heart sank as I reached for the phone. The vet told me she was so sorry, but our dog had passed. You see, she had been rushed to the emergency vet the night before. We thought she was going to recover, but just like that, she was gone. My husband and I held each other and cried. This just seemed like too much. In our sadness, she had been such a comfort. Now she was gone. Hadn’t we had enough grief? Why this too?...
