4-15-22 JOY IN SORROW

Every Wednesday I pick up my four-year-old granddaughter Tessa from pre-school, then drive her to ballet class. Afterwards she spends the rest of the day with me. Sometimes I get giddy on Tuesday night when I am getting ready for bed and start thinking about what I need to do the next day, then I realize it will be my Tessa Day! 

Tess dressed herself for ballet this day.

I recognize it is a rare privilege and blessing to be able to spend weekday time with my grands. I thank my Lord for it. Tess seems to always be so happy to see me. I know that this will wane as the years progress, so I am soaking it up as much as I can. She showed me, when I picked her up, her pre-school artwork for the day, a caterpillar named Clay and a butterfly she named Vernal. As we walked out she told me it was going to be Easter this weekend. I asked her if she knew how Easter started, and she said nope. I actually think she knows more than she says she knows. Nonetheless, I told her that the holiday started with Jesus. Without getting into too much of the troubling details that baffle the mind and alter the mood of old ladies and children alike, I told her  the story of Jesus leading, teaching, loving, dying and then that he received a new body. "And that's what Easter celebrates, that all of us will also get a new body for our spirits to live in." 

"And then the caterpillar became a butterfly."

"Did you know, Tess, that before you got your body... you know how you came out of your mama (I was there, and it was so cool!)... your spirit lived somewhere else and didn't have a body. Then, ta-da, you got A BODY! And I got mine that way too. Everyone did. Then when our bodies are done living they die, but our spirits don't die, they go on living. But guess what? Because of Jesus we get to have a body again that will not die, and that will be so awesome! Jesus' body died on Good Friday, and he was resurrected, or got his new body, on Sunday, and that's Easter."

Tess shouted from her car seat behind me: "You mean Jesus died on FIRST FRIDAY? That is so cool! I LOVE First Fridays!"

I repeat...Tessy is four. This spirit-body-life-death stuff is for sure pretty complex and confusing. Four-year-olds learn to disregard info that is overwhelming and focus on what they can understand. To her, there was mention of a first Friday, not Good Friday, and to her First Friday is the day she and her siblings get to sleep over at Gummy and Gumpa's.

Sometimes we hold whole conversations
with only the words "Meow."

So I've been thinking, this Good Friday, about not insisting that my Tess fully understand the heavy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I cherish that any hint of it might represent joy to her. We should all be four years old sometimes.

Good Friday can get heavy and sorrowful to me, if I let myself go there. I can feel the physical and emotional pain of the Lord I have come to love. And I can really empathize with the emotions of the women who loved him and saw him suffer and die. I imagine the confusion of the masses of followers, confused that he did not save himself the way he had saved so many others. I have stopped myself from going so deep I cannot lift out of it. (Empathy can be so distressing. My Annie suffers from an excessive amount of empathy. She's Tessa's mom.) Tessa is teaching me, in her innocence, to bathe in the joy as much as I cover myself with compassion and empathy. We need joy. I need joy! Not just the prospect of joy. I need to find some portion of it in the moment.

Her dress is on backwards,
and inside out,
and she is full of joy!

I recognize that earthly life is a pendulous experience. We must have opposition in all things. It does not only mean good must counterbalance evil. It also means light counterbalances darkness, laughter provides equal weight against sadness, truth swings with even measure against falsehood. Like the pendulum on the clock in our entry hall, the pendulum swings back and forth, back and forth, and this moves time forward. Perhaps in the next realm we will not need that counterbalance, because we will not need time... but that is getting old-lady-deep and today I seek joy!

I've discovered that most often joy comes to me when I recognize the bounty that surrounds and embraces me and mine. It's literally everywhere. I cannot move through a day and not be effected by it. Running water, electricity at our fingertips, cars, roofs over our heads, friends and family to share energy and communicate... So much. SO much! When I start naming in my head the wonders of my daily existence, simple things, I find joy starting to bubble up through the heaviness.

When I think of Jesus saying "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do, I think that he was not just talking about the people in front of him. He was also talking about me. He jumped out of himself and his agony and into his deeper purposes. He came to save. He came to save even those who did not realize they need to be saved. None of us really know what we are doing.

This Good Friday I have determined to let myself acquire a bit of my Tess. Think of this as First Friday. He got to go to His Father's house for a long sleep-over.

Whatever emotions come to me, or to you, this day, I honor Him  in my joy and sorrow. He could not have been raised had he not first died.