Straddling Between the Peaks and Valleys

For me, this past week has been one of great highs and low lows. On one hand, my book launched and I experienced the culminating thrill of all the hard work finally coming to life. In addition to release day festivities in my hometown, our family traveled to Nashville where I attended a couple book events.  The trip, however, was primarily to visit special friends. Just being with them, meeting their friends and exploring a different place transported us to a place of rest and temporary forgetting of our responsibilites at home. Although it would’ve been great to be at home to cheer on my daugher’s friends on the high school volleyball team that won State Saturday night. Certainly all highs not typical of every week.

On the other hand, while away we learned of the tragic death of a teenager at our high school. One of my sons is only a grade behind this young man, who he had wrestled with. His dad is the varsity wrestling coach and science teacher. In a separate incident a single engine plane crash killed a man from our community, whose college freshman daughter is someone my daugher knows. My Nashville friend was also grieving – over the loss of her friend last week to suicide. Cancer diagnoses, relational conflict and emotional bankruptcy also dotted my week.  Lows that can’t go much lower.

While every week is not so extreme, we do live in constant tension between joy and sorrow, the now and the not yet, good and evil, and ups and downs. We want to celebrate what is good, but feel guilty when we know others are suffering. And yet if we were all in deep darkness who would be there to give light? So we are left conflicted, straddling between the peaks and valleys… where real life is lived.

We want to stay on the mountaintop, but because we don’t we are reminded this is not our home. And while the good times and blessings are a pointer to what’s to come, we must endure the sorrow and despair all around us. Only we don’t have to go at it alone!

Just last night at my girls’ Bible study we talked about the reality of Jesus’s sacrifice and suffering. Not just on the cross, but in taking on our humanity. Think about it – Jesus left the perfection of heaven to enter into our sinful, broken world only to be persecuted and rejected. But it was through His suffering, which He counted as joy, He was made perfect! And because He was He is now able to perfectly identify with us in our pain and suffering.

In becoming man He experienced every emotion, disappointment and heartache that we do. He knows what it is like to be misunderstood, rejected, gossiped about, excluded, lonely, sad, stressed, afraid, angry and to face temptation.  Because He understands, He draws near and gives hope.

Hope, as David Crowder sings, that “earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal.” And when we struggle to believe this is true, He calls us again to drink from His fountain of grace to sustain us until that day when all things are made new.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.” And he who sat upon the throne said, “Behold I make all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment. He who conquers shall have this heritage, and I will be his God and he shall be my son.” Revelation 21:1-7