What Lies Deep Beneath is Sadness

“Every person has their secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a person cold when they are only sad.”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If we were brutally truthful, boiled down to the rawness in our brokenness, we would admit we are bereft of the sanctity of meaning in this existence called life. Without God the case is hopeless. What lies deep beneath each of us is an essential sadness—that God-shaped hole that only the Spirit of God, moment-by-moment, may fix.

Then again, there is the person who does appear cold, or angry, or confused. Because we have no idea why they are this way we assume the wrong thing. We think it’s their fault. Hardly ever do we contemplate just how much of a struggle it is to be human.

The truth of the matter is, when people are negative or unfriendly or unkind they must be enduring a living hell. It must be hard for them. This must surely feed our empathy.

Courageously Entering into the Truth of Sadness

The more we enter into our essential and categorical sadness, the more we find we need God. The less denial we venture into, the more the truths of this life compound within our understanding.

There are so many stark realities. There are too many to handle on our own. Life without God, in the midst of such stark realities, forces us to worship other things merely to survive.

But when we courageously enter into the truth of our sadness—which is a fearless journey into truth because we want to be fooled no more—we are quickly compelled to fall headlong into the arms of God.

This is a raucous blessing.

To have found so quickly the end of life, to have found comprehensive hopelessness—the life without God—we rush back there, into the availing Presence of the Lord Almighty.

Sadness as a Key To the Happiness in God

When we consider that people are sad for all sorts of reasons, whether they admit it or not, we understand sadness is part of the human condition.

We can deny our sadness, or we can manipulate the sadness into coldness or anger, or we can be honestly sad. To live this life, which is in some ways an incredibly blessed phenomenon, requires much tenacity. And when we delve into why tenacity is required just to endure our days we come home to the truth that life is hopeless without God. Such truth would be scary, but God is the ultimate answer.

Coming home to our sadness, as we relate within our consciousness of the fact, is the fly-wire door we must open before we open the main door—the entry into the courts of the Lord.

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When we understand and accept sadness is a natural part of life we understand how much we need God.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.