God has a way of soothing the hurt

I was reeling from my friend's sad news. (BTW I heard you say, "You think?") I was so sad. I found a blog written by a woman who was dying from Cancer. She was a new mother and a wife and had everything to live for. She was angry that her body was betraying her and taking her away from her children and husband. She found this passage in a book called Kitchen Table Wisdom (credit coming soon as I cannot remember the author.) While the passage is talking about cancer and dying, I found it comforting to me in this IF struggle as well. I hope it helps you too.

“I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional will to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to love despite the possibility of love, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing. Surrendering our lives to God gives us the freedom to experience real joy.

“The willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a position, we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant life, or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than to happiness.”