Will the Sad Things Come Untrue?

In Lord of the Rings, it is Sam who asks the question, sort of rhetorically, "Is everything sad going to come untrue?” He asks this question when he sees that Gandalf, who he thought was dead, is indeed alive. He also asks this question because everything in his world that he loved had been lost—his home, his friends, his pipe weed, his pots and pans, and he even believed himself dead. So to see something he loved not lost sends him into deep wonder, and you can almost feel the sadness melting away, a sadness that had grown and intensified for almost a year. For almost a year, he had watched the world he loved systematically taken away.

Sadness is what you feel when something you love is taken away or lost. In a fallen world, we have no choice but to deal continually with sadness. The deeper we love something, the more sadness we feel when it is lost. In fact, as uncertain as the world is, there is no way we can avoid sadness. I remember thinking that, with six children, I had multiplied my capacity for deep joy and also deep sadness. Chip Dodd in his book Voices of the Heart says, “We cannot delight deeply in anything or anyone unless we are willing to walk in a world of sadness. Sadness allows the intimacy and impact of love to be much richer because it exposes the heart to its ability to value and honor.”

Sadness is the ability to feel the pain, not deflect it or act like we don’t care. Sadness is what leads us to grief, healing, and an anticipation for our true home—heaven. We will never get to a place where we are free of sadness in this world. However, sadness is so hard that many people either choose never to love at all, and thus avoid getting hurt, or when they are hurt, they deflect it to other people in the form of self-pity. Self-pity is the way we guard our hearts and make other people hurt.

This Sunday we are going to talk about sadness and how it is both a gift and a blessing. And yet like most good gifts given by God, if they are neglected or used the wrong way, we wind up impaired, and we wind up hurting ourselves and other people—particularly those we love the most.

Can’t wait to see you all Sunday. After being gone for almost two weeks, Teri and I were talking the night before we came home and confessed to each other a certain sadness; we missed our home—our people and place. The lodging was great, the friends and conversations excellent, and California and Colorado were breathtaking. So why so sad? We weren’t home! One of the other things about why sadness is a good thing—it makes us long for home. Our true home—heaven.

Blessings,

Jim