To the Mom Who's Sad

I keep waiting to write this blog until my own sadness has been lifted. I keep waiting to sit down so I can write, "Whew. Ok, I'm on the bright side of things, here's what I learned." But I can't fake it. I can't write that blog.

So instead of writing that one, which I would feel much better about, I will write this one.

It is still watery over here. It's still lapping at the nape of my neck; it is still rushing over my body every now and then in teeth-chattering waves. I am still a sinner. I am still off-center. I am still sometimes, simply sad. 

Let me clarify, I am not a sad person.

I have joy. I have clarity. I have strength-filled moments: moments where I see God's work in my heart on full display. I laugh with my kids. I joke with my husband. I send silly messages to my friends. But when I whisper to my husband how I'm truly feeling on the sad days, he is often surprised. I am not hiding the sad, I am just not surrendering to it. I am including it in the canon of my emotional context,  but not letting it define me.

I learned this from someone. Jesus.

Deep feelers, deep thinkers; they get assaulted by sad. Even Jesus did. And that's where I feel relief seep in. That's where I turn to the scripture and peel back the layers of the Hebrew to find something I never noticed before, something that doesn't encourage the sad, but that does explain it. And in turn, glorifies God.

Yes, your sadness can glorify God. Wait for it. Here we go.

I drove by an old house today. I saw two young guys cutting down a massive tree. They had messy hair. Unshaven faces. They were hard workers. Sawdust covered their shoulders. Their faded flannels were pelted by the cold rain. They carried large wood rounds to the truck and back. Cars were zooming by; no one cared to pay attention to the take down. There was no glamour in the work. There was simply a task; a blade; a haul; and a repeat.

This is what Jesus did until he began his service. He did menial tasks. He was not esteemed.

"He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief'." Isaiah 53:2-3.

In this passage of Isaiah, we read a foreshadowing of Jesus' life and death on the cross, but we also get a rare peek into Jesus' temperament. Jesus had a personality. Do you ever think about that? And here it says, that one of the things that marked his unique individuality was that he was "a man of sorrows".

Wait. He wasn't the life of the party? He wasn't the guy who was always good for a laugh? He wasn't Jesus the singing jumping bean?

Hmmm. Man of sorrows. What is there to learn here? That doesn't seem right.

When I cross-referenced the Hebrew word for sorrow, I found that it is makob, which translates into pain. This includes both emotional and physical pain. Jesus didn't just have a painful path to the cross. He lived a life in which he felt pain. His sorrow was in no way bigger than his joy or purpose–it just reverberated back and forth between the two. Like a wire. Like tension. Like us.

Little children loved coming to Jesus, and we know as parents that little kids don't like wet blankets. So we can be sure that Jesus was the most passionate and compassionate human in history. (John 15:11, Luke 10:21) But He had days of sadness too. 

However, with Jesus I'm beginning to see that it isn't his sadness that matters, it is why he was sad.

You have permission to feel sad. But you can not claim that sadness for yourself. Here's what I mean. 

In my own life, I've found that sadness can become a form of entertainment. It can become a velvet-cased jewelry box that adds preciousness to my plight. Life is so hard. I'm sad. If we follow Christ, we have to warn ourselves when this type of spotlight sadness threatens to overshadow our days. We don't want to be sad for sad's sake. We want to be women of purpose in it. We need to attach it to Reason, so it doesn't return to us void. (Isaiah 55:11)

So I went looking for another place for this type of pain. I found the Hebrew word makob again in Ecclesiastes 1:18, "For with great wisdom comes great frustration; whoever increases his knowledge merely increases his heartache." The word heartache here is the same as the word used for "sorrows" in Isaiah.

Jesus was a man of heartache. Of sorrows. Because he knew.

He knew what he would have to do. He knew he would be mutilated beyond recognition to give life to the lost. And he knew that the lost would continue to look for life in the wrong places. Even after he did the dying. 

But here is where shame has no place in our sadness. In Ecclesiastes 1:13 we read, "It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with."

The men who were working in the rain. The burdensome task. To keep them occupied. To keep them asking, "Is this all there is?"

It is an unhappy business. 

The constant crying. Feeding. Lifting. Bathing. Headaches. Stomach aches. Tiredness. The messiness. The clean up. The clutter. The burdensome tasks. The constant day in and day out work can grind us down. It can cut us up into heavy pieces that we lug back and forth.

Btu what it we lugged our pieces to the Bible? To the feet of Jesus? What if we loaded and unloaded our burdensome tasks into puddles of pain on our bedroom floors. In worship. In wondering. In asking. What if we confessed and recounted and cut down and rebuilt that sadness into something like sanctification?

That begins to look a lot like glory-giving grief. God's glory. 

If your sadness leads you to the deeper understanding of purpose–one that goes beyond scrubbing plates and gathering crumbs or getting promotions or winning competitions–then it is fruitful sadness. If your sadness echoes an ancient truth that this isn't what was made to fulfill you, then your sadness begins to make sense. If we begin to realize in deep somberness that all of our daily burdensome tasks only occupy our hands but don't fill our hearts, we are beginning to get it.

We are beginning to understand how God could be perfect and be a man of sorrows at the same time.

Jesus' pain was a byproduct of knowing that there was and is a parallel purpose here on earth that a lot of us miss. You see, sadness is a song. One that plays below the surface of some of our deep-feeling souls, beating out like a drum. One that sometimes scares us. But its a song that invites us to ask why. And in the search, be diligent in always saying, "your will be done." 

Life. It is hard. It is the greatest mirage in the history of mankind. It promises things it can't deliver. 

Don't allow sadness to swallow you. Instead, shake hands with it and then introduce it to a God who knows exactly what to do with it: wrap it in skin. And name it Jesus.

We're in this together,
M