Chasing Delight in the Middle of Suffering
It started with cake. A cinnamon roll cake, to be specific. Sweet and soft and just decadent enough to feel a bit over the top—a little more than just a small part of the meal dropped off to help me through the most painful season of my life.
A few weeks before the cake arrived on my doorstep, my husband admitted himself to an addiction rehabilitation program, dark secrets finally out in the light. In the wake of his absence from me and our six children, I faced solo parenting for the ensuing four months. But even more, I faced the kind of hurt I was not sure I would ever heal from. I remember feeling as if everything around me would always be stained with sadness. I lay in bed unable to sleep but not wanting the morning to come. I couldn’t feel any kind of anticipation for the future because I could only get myself through the next hour. Sorrow hung in the air the way the scent of vanilla leaves my diffuser, as if being spread out into the room at a steady pace by the unwanted and unfair circumstances in my life.
And then, the cake. It came right-from-the-oven-warm and smelled so irresistibly of cinnamon and sugar I felt I had no choice but to rip the foil off the top and take a few bites before I even saw what had been brought for dinner. It was, perhaps, the best bite of food I’d ever tasted. I could not stop smiling. I texted my friend with copious amounts of emojis and exclamation marks, gushing over the goodness she ushered into our home that night. I need this recipe, Aimee! We are all obsessed! Oh my gosh, this is a magic cake! I don’t even think I need dinner now! Thank youuuuuu!
Something came over me that night, a visceral feeling that had been gone for weeks. It was, in part, the fun realization that God did not have to give us cinnamon when he thought up the details of all creation. But in his foresight and goodness, he saw this very moment in my kitchen, when my heart was buried in sadness. He knew before time that this earthy spice, mixed with a little butter, flour, and sugar, would kindly remind me how much good is still in the world. But it was more than that. It was delight. It was amusement. It was, quite simply, joy.
Joy Sustains the Suffering
When life is heaviest—perhaps in the wake of loss, trauma, shocking news, or trajectory changing diagnoses—it can be nearly impossible to imagine feeling anything but the emotions that accompany such weight: fear, anxiety, anger, even numbness. I felt every one of those things, at all hours of the day and well into the night, consuming my mind when sleep should have instead.
Yet it was a simple joy—a cake!—that brought back the most authentic, unforced smile to my face. My circumstances were still tenuous. The future was still unclear. The work of healing—of untangling a lot of deception and learning to trust a long process I could not fully control—remained part of my daily work. But what came over me in that moment was exactly what I needed: God-inspired permission to smile, in spite of all the ways I was hurting.
Gary Haugen, founder and CEO of the International Justice Mission, knows a good deal about pain. His work to help “the least of these” in the most dire and unjust of circumstances forces him to come face to face with sin, exploitation, and brokenness every single day. He says that no one can do that kind of work without attending to their own souls, without coming up for air. And this air he speaks of? It’s joy. As he has said before, “Joy is the oxygen for doing hard things.” He and his colleagues force themselves to be intentional about laughter and silliness, not to ignore the devastation that they see and know all too well, but to sustain their engagement with it.
This, friends, is a lesson for all of us.
The Choice We Have
It’s tempting to keep ourselves from having fun or laughing or from finding delight and joy in the smallest things when we’re in the middle of a difficult season. Whether we cannot muster the energy to feel something different or we don’t even know where to begin, sometimes our default mode is to keep our emotions in check when our circumstances are unsteady, as if laughter makes our pain untrue or having fun means we are not heartbroken. But delight does not invalidate suffering or the hard work of healing, and laughter does not negate our tears. Rather, joy grabs our hands and gives us the stamina to get through the things we are not sure we can.
To be sure, mourning is a God-given emotion. There is a deep need to name and feel what is real about the painful circumstances in our lives, to cry over our losses, to not move on too quickly from the hurt, lest we put a Band-Aid on a wound that needs much deeper care. But in his goodness, God has given us daily, hourly, moment-by-moment delights, even in the middle of hard seasons: the taste of cake, warm sunshine on our shoulders, the giggles of our toddlers, the gifs and memes sent from friends that make us laugh until we cry. These moments—when we laugh, create, savor, or delight—these are all graces to keep us going. They are reminders that good and hard always exist together in a broken world. We can do our part to make sure the hard does not swallow our hope when we enjoy what’s good and beautiful. And funny. And delicious.
Until we get to the end of our stories, we won’t know what God will do, just how much redemption he will write in. Will we get the baby our hearts have always wanted? Will our spouses make the changes necessary for restoration? Will the healing we’ve prayed for come? Will the child who has lost his faith return to it? We cannot know these answers. The gospel of Jesus Christ never promised us an easy life; but the gospel does promise that God will be enough no matter our circumstances. And in the meantime, in the middle, we can push against the darkness by receiving God’s gift of joy. We can still choose adventure, water balloon fights with the kids, or a huge piece of cake before dinner, breathing in the oxygen God offers and that we need to keep going. Savoring the hundreds of moments of delight that come with each new morning mercy is not only a gift to receive; it’s a choice, and it’s ours to make today.
