Even in laughter the heart may be in pain, and the end of joy may be grief.  Proverbs 14:13

Solomon, most likely, wrote this proverb and he understood something unsettling about the human heart.  Opposing realities can live there at once. I can laugh and still be grieving. I can love God and still distrust Him in the places where life has broken me. And I can appear fully present while whole regions of my interior life remain sealed off from consciousness. Pain does not disappear just because I refuse to look at it. I just learn to live underground.

I’ve always been sensitive to the eyes of people in crowded rooms. Sometimes the person entertaining with humor is also the saddest one in the crowd.  Laughter is not necessarily dishonest; it may simply be the part of him that learned how to survive while another part remained trapped somewhere in the past.

God has never been absent from the rooms we try to avoid. He knew the moment each wound was made. He knew which conclusions we would draw from it about ourselves, about others, even about Him. And all those years, His invitation was not to just face our pain; it was to bring it to Him.  A profound difference exists between the two.  Lament becomes an act of faith as we pour out our hearts to Abba.

Healing does not erase the past. It integrates what suffering has fragmented.  Sorrow becomes a part of our story without putting its dark spin on it.  Our vernacular is touched with redemptive language.

Lord, let Your Word reach farther than my defenses. Amen