Thought for the day
'Thought for the Day' is provided by Major Chris Witts from The Salvation Army's Communications Department in Sydney, Australia. You can tune in to hear Chris's devotions every weekday at 9:05am on FM103.2 - The Heart Of Sydney.
Sadness
My guess is that you have experienced sadness at least once this year. It’s a fact of life that unfortunate events occur and we become sad. But there’s a problem - we live in an age when it’s often thought that being sad is a bad or harmful thing. Who said sadness is a terrible emotion? Why is it so urgent that we deliver people from their state of sadness? If you’re a happy person, everyone wants to be around you, but don’t show emotions of sadness, because it sends the wrong message. We avoid problems, we run from difficulties, we despise troubles and we don't want to deal with things that make us unhappy. Life is hard enough as it is. Our society says, "Forget your troubles. Turn your back on them. Do everything you can not to face them. Sorrow is bad; happy is good." I think that should be challenged. We live in a world where all too often there is good reason to be sad. Life in our modern world leaves lots of people feeling lost and adrift, isolated from others and lonely.
It's okay to be sad
Ours is a world marked by loss, and many of those losses are painful, such as losses of love, friendship, and intimacy. Romantic relationships end, spouses are unfaithful, married couples separate and divorce. There is the loss of health in the diagnosis of serious illness. There is also the death of beloved pets who sometimes seem like the best friends we have. Sometimes we see tragic events in the lives of our friends. All of these circumstances are good reasons to be sad. They are not an indication that something is wrong with us or that our hearts, minds and souls aren’t working right. In fact, if we weren’t sad in circumstances like these, that would be an indication that something is wrong with us. Being sad sometimes is part of being a caring person in an imperfect world. We don’t need to blame ourselves.
Do you know that Jesus Christ experienced sadness? In John 11 we see the story of his friend Lazarus who had died. He had two sisters called Martha and Mary who were very upset and asked Jesus to come. Verse 33 says, “when Jesus saw that Mary and the people with her were crying, He was terribly upset and asked ‘where have you put his body?' They replied ‘Lord, come and you’ll see’. Jesus started crying and the people said ‘see how much He loved Lazarus’”. Why was Jesus crying? Jesus stood in the midst of the mourners in this Middle Eastern scene of sorrow. He heard their cries of pain and loss, he saw tears streaming down despondent faces and the stench and ugliness of death engulfed Him like a noxious cloud. It must have been a chilling scene. In the midst of this dark moment of weeping and sorrow, Jesus felt intense pain swirling around Him, and He wept. He was deeply affected by the outpouring of grief that day – He also feels their pain and is overcome with grief. There was nothing wrong with that.
It’s helpful to know that Jesus is fully God and fully man, and to be human means feeling happy and sad. He is everything a human being is meant to be. So, being sad is okay. There’s nothing wrong with it at all. In fact, in God’s overall plan for our lives, He can take the sad moments and do a new work in us. Ecclesiastes 3 says, "To every thing under heaven there is a season, a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to weep and a time to laugh."
We can learn from sadness
When we go through sad times we learn how kind people can be. The mourning times of life also show us how wonderful good times really are. The sad times make us truly grateful for the blessings of life. When things go well, it's possible for us to live on the surface of things, but when sorrow comes we begin to truly understand the important things, the precious things, the deep things of life. Pain teaches us principles we could never learn from pleasure. One poet put it this way,
"I walked a mile with Pleasure; She chattered all the way,
But left me none the wiser for all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow, and ne'er a word said she,
But, oh, the things I learned from her, when Sorrow walked with me."
Psalm 34:18 says, "The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." In fact, Psalm 56:8 says that God collects every tear we shed. It says, "Oh God, You number my wanderings; You put my tears in a bottle." How wonderful to know we have a God who really knows our sad times and comes to us with refreshment and healing.