When Joy Sprouts Again

 When Joy Sprouts Again

"Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes

in the morning." ~ Psalm 30:5

      One of my favorite pastimes is gardening.  Tif and I used to garden all the time.  We would grow tomatoes, onion, squash, okra, all kinds of peppers (loved growing habaneros), green beans, lettuce, spinach, and the list could go on and on.  One particular plant that we could never seem to get rid of was cherry tomatoes.  Once a plant went to seed it seemed like each year multiple volunteer plants would break through the soil, even if I didn't want them to come back.  I didn't have to intentionally plant cherry tomatoes for three years, they just kept coming back.  This reminds me a lot of my intial steps with grief.  Prior to losing Tiffanie I was a pretty happy go lucky guy.  I was always trying to find the bright side, despite being a natural born worrier.  But Tif's cancer journey and death shifted something in me, I struggled to find joy.  A matter of fact I fought for joy.  I wondered if it would ever grow back, if joy would be a word that I was familiar with, a word that was theologically true, but a word that I would never personally experience again.     

      My world fell silent after losing Tif, I wondered if laughter would ever sound the same again.  I remember specifically laughing for the first time after her homecoming.  I was on my first video call with a new friend.  I remember that sound of laughter coming from my lips.  It had been almost a month since I laughed.  It caught me off guard.  Laughter should never catch us off guard!  The long winter days seemed darker and harsher than usual.  The winter is already difficult enough with the shorter amount of sunshine, but last winter just seemed even darker.  Even small joys seemed like memories from another life, a life that seemed like long ago. I knew the promise of Psalm 30:5, that joy comes in the morning, but I couldn’t see the sunrise yet.  It's hard to see the sunrise when the night is at its darkest.  You know it’s coming, but in the moment it's hard to see it.

      Part of grief is learning.  You are a student and your teacher is grief.  In order to move forward you have to be a patient teacher and allow grief to teach you.  You can't allow grief to be your master.  You can't allow it to dicate your thinking, emotions, choices, and responses.....but you need to allow it to be your teacher.  One of the lessons that I learned since then is that joy doesn’t return all at once. It doesn’t burst back into your life like a floodlight. It sprouts quietly, gently, like the first green shoot pushing through the ashes of winter.  I would liken it this way, when you plant a seed you don't see the tiny roots stretching deep into the ground.  That seed needs a deep rooting before it can break the soil.  The same can be said about joy.  It might seem that joy was yanked from the ground of your heart, but I assure you that the roots of joy remain, and friend they are sprouting upward.  Once again, we can't see or appreciate their growth under ground, but it's happening.

      It happens in moments you least expect.  One of my first moments of joy was hearing my nephew laugh for the first time.  Or another one is when a song no longer makes me weep but reminds me of heaven.  Or when I sit watching a sunset at the beach and I can almost hear God say "I'm still here."  Or my most prominent one, when love comes knocking at the door of your heart.

      These are signs of resurrection joy — not replacing your grief, but growing beside it.  For the person grieving the loss of a loved one you are simply planting a garden around our grief.  Our grief will never go away.  We don't merely move on, we move forward.  We choose, by God's grace, to plant beauty around that heartache.  God never asks us to forget. He asks us to trust that He can bring beauty from broken soil....that He can bring beauty from ashes. 

      The same God who met us in the valley will also meet us in the garden — where sorrow and joy somehow share the same space.  If you’re still waiting for joy to sprout again, take heart. Seeds take time. But under the surface, God is at work, nurturing new life you can’t yet see.  Trust Him as the days go by.  He will not fail you.