When Joy & Sadness Dance

A moment in time.

When I switched on my laptop this morning, a screen saver popped up with an image of a road through the Florida Keys, which was taken when we took a family holiday there back in May 2019.

And this picture felt significant for a few different reasons.

Let me explain below…

Firstly, how I feel today could not be more different from this memory.

As I write this, it’s a wet, grey February morning in England and I’m working from home during our third national lockdown which is beginning to feel like an endless drudgery. But back then, I was taking an extended road trip in the Florida sunshine and feeling extremely free…

Secondly, it was during this trip down to the Keys, that I first got the official notification from Tyndale that they were going to be publishing my first book, Sand Between Your Toes. That trip was 21 months ago! Because that’s how long it takes to write, edit and publish a book…

And thirdly, during that trip I was pregnant with what was later to become my third and final miscarriage. But at this stage, it was all going still well. I lost the pregnancy about six weeks later, and I haven’t been able to get pregnant again since...

That’s a lot of mixed emotions and memories to jump out at me, all from one snapshot of one moment in time!

Joy & sadness co-exist.

At the first glance, all I remember about the moment that photo was taken is feeling so much happiness and excitement; I thought that everything was finally going my way.

But actually, when I really pause and consider how it felt to be inside that moment, that wasn’t all that I felt. I also felt anxiety, doubt and fear too. What if I didn’t really have what it takes to write a whole book? What if we lost the baby again? And worst of all, what if I miscarried on that trip, thousands of miles from home?

The truth is that sometimes life gives you exactly what you expect (sunshine in the sunshine state of Florida). Sometimes it gives you more than you could ever hope for or imagine (my words being turned into a book!). And sometimes it cruelly refuses to give you what you long for the most of all (a second child).

But more often than not, it gives you all of those things at exactly the same time, because joy and sadness aren’t mutually exclusive.

More often than not, they co-exist, and they dance together...

The sadness.

If you’re looking for examples of sadness, disappointment, or loss from the past year, you needn’t look too far! Chances are that if you’re a living, breathing human, you will have encountered some kind of disappointment, loss and sadness over this past year.

Even if you haven’t been grieving a physical loss such as pregnancy loss or losing a loved one in the covid-19 pandemic, you almost certainly will have been grieving the loss of your life as it was before, or of plans that were meant to be.

Plus, it’s hard to miss the broader sense of collective grief that seems to be in the air right now; you can feel it when people talk about the pandemic, or election results, or racial injustices, or natural disasters and the effects of climate change, as well as many other things besides.

Paul writes in Romans 8:22 that ‘all of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time’ and I honestly can’t think of a time where this has felt more tangible. Not all is right with the world today, and that is really sad.

But that is not the full story either, because God is also present in the sadness, offering us comfort and solidarity. Psalm 34:18 promises us that He ‘is near to the brokenhearted’, in Matthew 5 Jesus even describes those who mourn as ‘blessed’ which might sound a slightly strange notion, but after three years of recurrent losses in my own life I have found this to be true.

The blessing is not in the pain itself, but in knowing God is there in our sadness.

The joy.

It might seem strange or even a bit contradictory to talk about joy after all of those heavy subjects like pandemics and infertility and social injustice.

But for me, this past year has also been filled with surprising and unexpected joys too; like beach days, BBQs, family bike rides, outdoor meet ups with friends, and just a lot more time at home with my son. How about you?

CS Lewis, one of my favourite authors writes that, ‘Joy is the serious business of heaven’ and I fully concur. God is also present in moments of joy.

Psalm 16:11 says that ‘in his presence is fullness of joy’, Philippians 4 teaches us to ‘rejoice always’ because this is God’s will for us, and in John 10:10 Jesus says that he has come to give us ‘life to the full’.

God offers us reason to rejoice, and is present in our joy too.

The dance.

I talk a lot about how joy and sadness dance because this has been so much of my experience in these past months.

There was one day that sticks out in my mind, when my mum got in touch to say that she’d just had a breast cancer diagnosis confirmed, and then right after we heard that news, my husband and I took our son pumpkin picking on a local farm and we had a really fun day out together.

But I felt momentary pangs of guilt afterwards. Should we have cancelled it? And shouldn’t we have felt more sad for my mum? Sometimes it can be hard for us to sit in the emotions of pain and joy at the same time, can’t it?

Most of us tend to like things to be more easily categorised and compartmentalised. We prefer to use broad sweeping brush strokes like ‘All of 2020 was rubbish’ or ‘Everything in my life is going wrong …’ because that feels easier to understand. But the truth is that life isn’t nearly so black and white.

Life is full of these confusing tensions and juxtaposing emotions, isn’t it? Pain and joy continually coincide and collide.

A wedding celebration with a mention of a recently lost parent.

A family engagement alongside a messy divorce.

A dream job offer next to a colleague’s redundancy.

A baby announcement and a miscarriage shared amongst friends.

Sometimes it can be hard to navigate all these conflicting emotions, but this is life in all of its rich shades of colour: the beautiful and the broken, the bitter and the sweet, the pleasure and the pain.

And God invites us to embrace it all.

Practice celebration.

Life can seem really unfair sometimes, but isn’t that more reason to cultivate the practice of celebration?

As I have already alluded to, my husband and I have walked through a really devastating season of loss layered on loss over the past few years.

At times we have cried, shouted, grieved, wondered, worried, and wrestled with our questions to God while trying to process all that pain.

But at other times we have also chosen to put our best foot forwards and to celebrate in a very intentional way - even when our circumstances haven’t naturally pointed us towards this. Often we have decided to seek out and celebrate the good simply because we’ve needed. And the truth is that there is always something good, even in the darkest of times.

How does this look in practice? Often it’s a simple act like inviting friends over for meals and games, planning fun day trips out together as a family, or taking short weekend breaks for a change of scene.

Sometimes it takes real determination to choose to embrace the goodness in life when things don’t work out as you’d like. But as we followed King Solomon’s wise advice to “enjoy life” as best we could (Ecclesiastes 2:24), we discovered that there is simply no better way.

At times I still catch myself wondering whether we should be doing something more spiritual than celebrating instead. But God is part of these moments seasons of friendship, community, feasting and fun, just as much as any other.

Choosing to celebrate, even as joy and sadness dance, is such an important and underrated spiritual discipline. We can use it as an act of worship or warfare and as part of our healing too.

So let’s not side-line or undervalue this holy act.