Post Script | September 19, 2022
Sadness, My Teacher
I didn’t intend to take a month off from writing these letters to you. But life delivered surprise, as it often does. First, we moved my mom into her new apartment at the end of August. Five days later, I drove to Toronto to move our youngest daughter into her dorm room. Just as soon as I was home again, one of our sons tested positive for COVID. Two days later, I fell sick. And though the word on the street is that the newest variants are generally mild, my husband’s opinion is that I took longer to recover from COVID than from giving birth to my twins. I believe this to be a slight exaggeration—but only slight. Even now, nearly two weeks later, I’m still feeling sluggish, dealing with my own general impatience that somehow, I need to be getting on with it.
I need to get on with being well. I need to get on with adjusting to this new place. I need to get on with returning to the rhythms of being and doing as I’m used to. This impulse is so strong in me, to barrel into every next phase and every new opportunity with bullishness. But while I’ve tried channeling that kind of energy in this new place, it seems I can’t reliably find it now. I just feel tired. And truthfully, I also just feel sad.
Sadness is probably the most uncomfortable word in my emotional vocabulary. Certainly, I’m not the only one who hesitates to admit their sadness. In the string of days I was lying in bed, sick with COVID, one of the books I read was Bittersweet by Susan Cain. In the first chapter, Cain tells the story of Pixar’s blockbuster hit, Inside Out. Originally, the film’s director, Pete Docter, had written the screenplay without the dowdy blue character, Sadness, at the center of the film. He gave the film’s starring role instead to Fear. But three years into the development of the film, Docter realized the movie wasn’t working.
The movie would only work to put Sadness at the center of it all.
This all makes for a nice story—but it doesn’t mean that I really want sadness to take the starring role of this new season of my life. Maybe I’m afraid of missing out on the opportunity to make new friends—because who really wants a sad friend? Maybe I’m afraid that sadness will impede my work, paralyzing me in a state of despondent sluggishness. And maybe I’m most afraid that to be sad is somehow to betray the exercise of faith. If I’m sad, does that mean I’m somehow doing this all wrong?
As I continue to share these thoughts with God, trying as best I can to admit my sadness, I seem only to hear the gentle message to wait. As I pray, I seem only to grow more convinced that the valley of the shadow of death is not something to forever avoid. You can’t go under it, around it, over it: sometimes you simply have to go through. I should know this, of course, because I’m familiar with loss, having lost my father when I was in college, my brother a year after my graduation. But there are new losses now to face: leaving behind a place we loved; being far from our older children; walking the long road of a parent’s decline.
Wait, I hear. Don’t rush this sadness because it has something new to teach you. Perhaps it will remind me that I am, despite all my herculean efforts, a human being, not a machine. Perhaps it will force a deepening of my trust in God.
“O people of Zion, who live in Jerusalem,
You will weep no more.
He will be gracious if you ask for help.
He will surely respond to the sound of your cries.
Though the LORD gave you adversity for food
And suffering for drink,
He will still be with you to teach you.
You will see your teacher with your own eyes,” Isaiah 30:19, 20.
So: I’m waiting. And maybe you are, too? Waiting feels like the least productive thing to do in life. Better to get busy, get something done! But maybe this is another lesson sadness has to teach us, that productivity is an American virtue, not a Christian one. There is no command to be productive for God—only to live the well-watered, fruitful life in Christ.
Sadness is a wintering season, a time in which we send our roots deeper still into the One who was and is and is to come. The One called Man of Sorrows.
Thanks for reading.
Jen