Life Lessons – Reality Therapy

Sorrow, unfulfillment and grief must be companions on our journey through life. We may not want these traveling companions, but they remain present all the same. These unwelcome familiars are not the substance of our lives, but their presence and influence is woven into the very fabric of our living and learning and personal growth. They are beneficial specters: dogging our steps and haunting our paths. We cannot outrun them or will them away. We cannot shut them out with mental positivity. Or exorcise them with pleasure seeking. Or deny their presence or power by a charade of pretense.

So what are we to do with these uncompanionable companions? How are we to go forward in our lives and living with these “hangers on”? If you can identify the overshading of sorrow or melancholy or heaviness pressing down on you today, just check off the box: they are here, present and accounted for. But don’t spend your time wrestling with your morose companions; get on with the work God has given you to do today. Is it possible to still go forward in life, even with sorrow? Yes.

“Those who sow in tears,
shall reap in joy.
He who continually goes forth weeping,
bearing seed for sowing,
shall doubtless come again
with rejoicing
bringing his sheaves with him.”
Psalm 126:5-6

These verses set before us the description of the daily, continual work along with the burdensome companionship of tears and weeping. Work and active sorrow: side by side, seemingly hand in hand. The work doesn’t annihilate the sorrow; and the sorrow doesn’t stop the work. We have both in our lives: work to do and sorrow to bear.

These verses teach that work is to go forward in the active presence of sorrow. Work isn’t an antidote for sorrow but is to go on in spite of the burden of tears. The atmosphere is one wet with anguished tears yet the activity of the body and soul is to work.

There is a promise to the activity of sowing seed…there will be joy and there will be a tangible result of the work: an armful of harvested increase.