Holding All of It

I was recently listening to the On Being podcast with Krista Tippett. In one episode, she spoke with Sharon Salzberg about her work with parents who lost children in the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

During one gathering, a grieving parent raised her hand and said, “I feel strange. I’m having this meaningful, even beautiful experience learning mindfulness with you — and yet the only reason I’m here is because something terrible happened. I don’t know how to get over that.”

Salzberg gently replied, “I don’t know that we ever get over it. We learn to hold them both at once.”

That phrase stayed with me: hold them both at once. Joy and sorrow. Light and darkness. Gratitude and grief. It is all real.

The psalms understand this. They cry out in anguish and, sometimes in the very same breath, declare praise. They do not deny pain. They do not pretend everything is fine. But neither do they surrender the conviction that God is present.

And this is crucial: we do not praise cancer. We do not praise violence or dementia or pandemics. Christian praise is not denial. It is defiance. It is the stubborn confession that even here — especially here — God has not abandoned us.

Our hope is not that we will escape hardship. Scripture never promises that. Our hope is Emmanuel — God with us. The God who in Jesus entered suffering, held it, bore it, and redeemed it. The God who holds the whole of our lives — from birth to death and beyond.

I don’t know what you are carrying today. But I pray you will know this: you do not carry it alone. The One who holds joy and sorrow together is holding you even now.

Let us pray: Your righteousness, O God, reaches to the heavens. You who have done great things — who is like you? Be our rock and our refuge. Teach us to trust you in sorrow and in joy, and give us grace to sing your praise through it all; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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