What Happens

What Happens

It rains hard on a Wednesday, and you decide not to go out to lunch after all. You stay home instead and meet the mailman, who rings the bell to hand you a package and takes cover under your porch for a few extra moments to chat.

You had planned a trip to the library to finish some research tomorrow, but a cancelled appointment means you can go today instead. Minutes after you arrive, you hear the hushed voice of someone who lives six states away and whom you haven’t seen in a decade. Tomorrow he would have been back home.

So much of life is colored by what happens and what doesn’t. These two recent occurrences brought me unexpected joy, but their effect was momentary. Other happenings or nonhappenings carry a much greater impact, and their reverberations are far more lasting.

What happens: A husband’s unthinkable choice meets a hidden fault line in his marriage, and the ensuing crack breaks into a canyon that will not be filled.

What doesn’t: A friend longs to conceive a child and cannot. Every new turn of the calendar page inflicts an invisible blow to her tender heart, laying siege to her firm belief that God’s plan for her is good.

What happens: A colleague’s chronic illness turns pain and weakness into constant companions, not occasional pests. She masks her discouragement well, but you know—and your heart longs with hers for the bliss of a “normal” day.

What doesn’t: The job a talented coworker has earned and would excel at goes to someone else—someone who seems less gifted and less deserving.

Something happens. Something doesn’t. And life is changed, not so much by gain or loss, joy or sorrow, as by our response to it.

Today, for what happens and for what does not, may the God of all grace give you his limitless peace and boundless joy. For “who can say where the mourning ends and the dance begins?”^a

The LORD will comfort Israel again and have pity on her ruins. Her desert will blossom like Eden, her barren wilderness like the garden of the LORD. Joy and gladness will be found there. Songs of thanksgiving will fill the air.

Isaiah 51:3

^a Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 15.