Chocolate Smiles
Before we begin, take a moment and close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths and bring to mind a time you felt deep joy. Take a few more breaths. What emotions come to mind when you recall that event or scene or person? Sit with those emotions for a moment.
This was an exercise I was led through earlier this week. When I closed my eyes my son’s big old smile came to mind. His smile was covered in chocolate ice cream, along with the rest of his face, hands, and arms. He was experiencing pure joy as the sweet ice cream melted in his mouth, and I was experiencing pure joy watching him.
As this recent memory came to mind another emotion swelled into my heart. Sorrow. Deep, deep sorrow. This wasn’t anything new for me. For as long as I can remember any time I have experienced joy or happiness it has always been accompanied by sorrow. I’ve always felt crazy for feeling this. It has sometimes kept me from fully engaging in the beautiful moments in life because I know that a deep sadness will quickly flood my heart.
As the group I was in went around sharing what they had experienced during the exercise my friend Drew shared a memory of his newly born child. He mentioned that his sense of joy also created a sense of sorrow or a sense of longing in his heart. When he shared this my ears and heart perked up. I thought “I am not alone!” And Drew had better explained what I have experienced all my life.
The sorrow I often experience in joyful times is more of a longing. I never want that moment to end. As much as I look forward to the day when Soren is out of diapers and can have a fully cohesive conversation with me, I am already mourning the day he’d rather go hang out with his friends on a Friday night than cuddle with Mom and Dad.
C.S. Lewis spoke to this experience in a way only C.S. Lewis can do it.
“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”
The joy and longing that my son’s chocolate-covered face births in me is a signpost to a day when those moments will never fade off into the sunset. The joy and the accompanied longing that I experience during life’s most beautiful and sacred moments are, for me at least, a signpost pointing to the resurrection of our Lord.
The Bible ends with a picture of a day when all of our deepest longings will be fulfilled as we are face to face with God in the new heavens and new earth. These deep emotions I experience are teaching me that the resurrection is not just some theological doctrine to be studied in ivory towers. The resurrection offers me real hope and gives me a framework to process all of the emotions that I experience on this side of the new creation.
So, the next time we feel that deep sorrow creep in as we experience pure bouts of joy, may we lean into it and receive it as a gift from the Lord himself, assuring us that a day is coming when that joy will be experienced in an even grander way and in a that will never fade.
Grace and peace ‘til we rise in glory.
