On Hearing an Echo of a Great Sadness

The heart beats from contraction to rest and back to contraction again.

The seasons go from summer to winter and back to summer again.

Evening and morning are the first day, and the next, and the next.

Life goes from sadness to joy to sadness to joy.  It does not seem to jump from joy to joy, with nothing in between.  It does not trudge from sadness to sadness, with nothing in between. 

The tides come in, and the tides go out.  There is a rhythm to them, an order, a time for the high and the ebb, for the sadness and the joy, for the evening and the morning.

There is a time for everything, a time for every purpose under heaven.  And God Himself is in the rhythm of all.

Sometimes it's difficult to see Him in a moment, in an event, in a situation.  One of the spiritual direction questions is "Where is God in all this?" and sometimes that's a hard one to answer.  In my sadness or my grief or my ebb tides I have real difficulty seeing Him or His actions or His movement.  I take no comfort from someone in their joy or high tide times saying to me "all things work together for good" or something similar.  I just can't see the goodness of God when all I see are empty stretches of sand.  What if God is not in the empty stretches?

If God is not in the empty stretches, at least He is in the Rhythm, in the comings AND goings, in the weeping AND the mourning, in the flow of the seasons and in the flow of the tides, in the flow of tears of sorrow and in the flow of tears of joy.

Our story in God's loving care in this world is not about permanence, it is about movement.  Our only permanence is in heaven.  Until we get there it is about journey, about movement.  Nothing lasts - neither joy nor sorrow, neither night nor day, neither height nor depth - only the rhythm.  And it is in the Great Rhythm that we can most assuredly find the God that loves us - the Rhythm of Creation and Redemption and Sanctification, danced by Father and Son and Holy Spirit as they carry us, the children of God, in their arms into the home where we will rest forever in the rhythm of peace that is His heartbeat.