When I was in my second year of studies I caught a proper case of the blues. One of my professors called me into her office, pulled a graph up onto her laptop screen and asked, “What is this?” The graph might have been illustrating a plane in the throws of a crash landing but it was actually exposing the descent of my recent assignment and test results.
I had gone in there, jaw set, eyes like stone, but she was not one to be messed with and her care and concern that day matched her strictness on any other day. I began to sob. “I’m not exactly sure,” I wailed, “and you are going to think I’m ridiculous, but there are so many things to be sad about!” I began to rattle off what was on my mind and she scuttled around the desk clucking away and wrapped her arm around me. To name a few, one friend lay paralysed after an accident, another friend had endured a nightmare that left us all heart-broken and reeling, my Oupa was gone and he was never coming back, farm invasions back home were in full swing and it was as simple and complex as this:
My innocent, carefree childhood, remarkably free of pain, was over.
The world I had believed to be full of sunshine and roses was full of storms and devilish thorns too. Bad things happened to good people, and my marks were the last thing on my mind. I was in the doldrums and I had no idea how to get out of them.
I cried and vented and I forget her exact words, but when I was done she told me that the world was, indeed, full of trouble, but that there was so much good too. I think she told me to focus on the good and she definitely told me to pull myself together. Things could not carry on the way they were unless I wanted my academic flight to crash and burn.
‘A burden shared is a burden halved’ they say, and I did feel a bit better after that. My real turn around, however, occurred as I listened to someone reading aloud from Isaiah 60. The words pierced like a miracle song into my night. Heaviness dissolved in a moment, and light-hearted joy came trickling back through my life, this time not because I was ignorant and naive, but in spite of my sorrows and disappointment with humanity and the world.
Isaiah 60 v 1 “Arise (from the depression and prostration in which circumstances have kept you – rise to a new life!) Shine (be radiant with the glory of the Lord), for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you!
I began to realise my daily need for a Saviour. He is not a God who saves us only once on the day of our conversion. He pulls us out of pits and like the Good Shepherd that He is, He leads us beside quiet waters, restoring our wounded, depressed, disappointed souls…daily!
One afternoon this week, I got news that a friend’s mother had died. The tears rolled down my cheeks as I sat in that parking lot, trying to make sense of her departure. Who now would laugh and be kind to the same degree she could? A few hours later I heard that a new baby in our community had been born. One long, beautiful life had come to an end and another was just beginning. All on the same day. Some people were grieving and others were celebrating.
And that’s life. Good and bad, making us glad and sad.
A song in the night, a light in the dark, a solid rock when the storm is raging – that’s what we need. He is all we need. My circumstances remained unchanged but Love showed up and changed me.
Eternally grateful.
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