Joy and Sorrow Mingled Together * Updated

The week before he got a call to say come, it is your dad's last hours. He went. It wasn't his dad's last hours. He was at his growing-up home for a week. Then he came back to his daily-life-home to a baby shower for his first-born child that is waiting to be born, trying to be born early. Fathers were at the shower giving advice to the dad-to-be. Reflecting on our fathers -- his father he had just left, not doing well -- and he is becoming a father.

He is waiting. Waiting for new life to be born into this world. Waiting to become a dad for the first time as his dad struggles to cling to life -- heart issues, kidney issues, and now cancer, too.

And I think of Edith Schaeffer's words in her book What is a Family?:

 "There is never a series of little packages of time give to you in life labeled: time for an illness, time for a wedding, time for a death, ...time for a disappointment.' You can’t face the sickness, the operation, the broken arms and legs, the serious diseases, the disasters or even the headaches, unless you realize there is never a convenient time set aside for joy or sorrow, protected by neat little walls so that two things will not mingle and spoil each other." (emphasis mine).

There are no neat little boxes to separate the joy from the sorrow. They come mingling down together. I think of Jesus, who knew just moments later he would raise his friend from the dead, yet Jesus wept, too.

He is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He understands. We have a high priest who understands the sorrows of this world and the griefs we bear that seem to dim the joys that are awaiting around the bend. Or is it the joys mingled into the sorrows that help us bear the sorrows?

Will you pray with our dear friends as they are still waiting for the baby to be born and his dad was rushed back to the hospital this morning hundreds of miles away? Thank you dear friends.

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I wanted to update this to say: his dad went home to be with the Lord on March 7. 

His firstborn entered this life on March 18. 

Please keep this precious family in your prayers. 

Thanks.

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Linking with Jen at the SDG Sisterhood

And with Michelle at Hear It on Sunday, Use it On Monday