Even Sorrow
Here, You Are
for Amy
You are in the common thrush
Outside my window, uncommonly
Lush with feather and song.
You are in the wilding wind
Making treetops dance
As if they, too, could fly.
And You are in the clouds that hover,
Grey with grief,
Over the barren earth below.
Everything,
Even sorrow,
Holds a hidden grace.
So why should I fear tomorrow’s rain,
Much less the page before me—empty
Moments ago—now brimming with praise?
This week, I’m simply sharing a poem. My soul and body have been weary, so I wasn’t planning to write anything since it has become continuously apparent that sorrow cannot, as it were, be confined to a one-week acceptable grieving period—as much as I have tried. I’m just not good at holding grief. But I’m learning to walk with it, becoming less afraid to hold its hand.
I sat down to journal this Wednesday afternoon, pausing to look outside at the grey clouds as the rain began to fall. My pen poised above an empty page, the line “Even here, You are” came to mind and an unexpected poem grew from there. Even here, in this place of sadness and gratitude and weariness and hope and grief, God Is.
After writing the poem, it felt incomplete. But I had a meeting I needed to attend, so I set my poem aside. What came from that meeting was a conversation about the many contours of sorrow, and together we wondered, how do we hold hope in our hearts when sorrow feels just as close—closer than our skin? It feels impossible to hold both sometimes, but both sorrow and hope are brutal yet beautiful teachers if we allow them to be.
When I look back past seasons of suffering, I can see how the dark nights of depression and despair taught me more about the light than years of endless daylight and happiness ever could. Even though it doesn’t feel that way now, I know that someday, today’s sorrow will be laced with gold.
Maybe everything, even sorrow, holds a hidden grace.
That’s the piece that was missing—the final piece of my poem. And that’s the piece I was unexpectedly given, when the meeting I thought would be an interruption turned out to hold the key upon which the poem turns.
Today, may you stretch your arms wide to receive the possibility that everything, even sorrow, holds a hidden grace.
Amen.