I wrote this responding to a CRC-Voices post about trying to rejoice at another person’s good fortune.

Lew Smedes wrote a little booklet asking the question if we should celebrate a miracle. That was during the Wimber/Fuller Signs and wonders days.

Maybe I should change the question to ask “can I celebrate someone else’s good fortune?”

Now at 47 I’ve piled up enough loss to know something of this territory. I love a lot of what a lot of you wrote. I can relate.

I liked what Pete wrote too about not being too afraid of pain. Pain is hard, but it can be a good reminder of reality. I have a friend who has neuropathy because of his diabetes. He often doesn’t take good care of his feet. One day he couldn’t figure out why he was struggling to get his shoe and sock off. He’s large and overweight and so its a struggle to get down there to his feet. As he struggled he eventually discovered that he had stepped on a nail which had pieced his shoe, his sock and his foot and was holding it all together. Pain is important.

I have lived a few years now with some significant pain in my life. There are lots of kinds of pain. Rod, Ken and David have shared with us some of their physical pain and we feel for them. Other kinds of pain as most of us know are not physical but still go down deep, perhaps deeper. We learn to live with it, but it is not a thing that we can live with mindlessly. Pain can be a tricky partner because it can lead us to embrace various lovers like bitterness, hatred, envy, as well as some seemingly sweet lovers like escapist fantasies and addictions which can become our jailers. But pain itself is not evil, it is a witness to the breaking of shalom and a teacher in the age of decay. It reminds us that loss is real, but hope can be more real still.

Jesus was called a man of sorrows. I can’t follow a Buddha who escapes pain by escaping attachment. I believe in the book that says God himself knows pain. This God doesn’t detach and avoid pain like I would likely do if I had the chance. When we are baptized into Christ we are baptized into his sufferings. When he was incarnated he was baptized into ours. I can trust a man who didn’t need to know pain but knew it for my sake.

I also think CS Lewis was onto something with his musing about sehnsucht. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht

Last night I slept through most of a German movie about a man who after WWII was sent to a Gulag on Siberia’s Eastern shore and walked his way out of the country to Iran and made it eventually home. When he arrives home he looks through the windows at his wife and kids, but can’t bring himself to go in. They hurry out the door to go to church. He finally comes into the back of the church and is spotted by his daughter who recognizes him, as does soon his wife. The moment is palpable and powerful, all because of pain.

I also like the scene in the movie the Color Purple where Shug makes her way down to the church to be reconciled with her father. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7ZT5sajkys I cry every time I watch it.

I am not capable of doing the math on loss and joy, but what I can do is look to the only one that I think can and trust him in the midst of my pain. My promise if found in the imperishable body of Christ which has broken through the age of decay and will some day abolish it. The details of how this relates to loss I will leave with him. pvk