Those who rightly experience the world ought to live life in constant emotional turmoil. To understand the world, to see it and feel it as what it is, cannot be a balanced experience, because the world isn’t balanced. The world is full of good and bad and horror and wonder. And if we don’t feel joy and misery and bliss and despair, then I don’t know what we’re experiencing, but it isn’t this world. We should have trouble concentrating at work every day because we are so happy because the sky is blue, and have trouble focusing at work the next day because there is such a thing as a foster system. We oughtn’t be able to sleep one night because a high school buddy’s dad just died of throat cancer, and we ought to sleep like a baby the next night because God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. We were not meant to spend our lives in a quiet contentment, avoiding most pain and experiencing moderate pleasure. No. Because our world doesn’t just sort of avoid most pain and experience moderate pleasure.
Rather, ours is a world of hospital ships off the coast of Africa, fixing the faces of children, bringing together all the ugliness of the vandalism sin has heaped on the innocent and all the beauty of making right what is wrong.
Ours is a world where fish swim under water, where dirt grows green hair, where humans walk like upside down pendulums, where fathers play pitch and catch with their sons, and it is beautiful.
Our world is filled with carnivals and parades and gang rapes. With board games and fish tanks and weapons of mass destruction. With sunny days and blue skies and tsunamis and earthquakes. Every day there are babies crying with their first breath and mothers crying that their baby never got to draw a breath.
If we do not feel that, all the wonder and the ugliness, all the pain and the ecstasy, if we do not laugh in the face of the thunderstorm and then cry to watch the 6:30 evening news, I don’t know what world we are experiencing, but it is not this one.
Beautifully written.
I tend to cling to this, especially after James died.
http://blindirishpirate.blogspot.com/2011/10/rest-of-story.html
I thought this was relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HbYScltf1c&feature=player_embedded#t=1
(Language alert)