The following devotional is one that I receive weekly. When I read it today I instantly wanted to share it with my Victory Call sisters because all of us are experiencing life which is full of sadness and celebration. How are we to think on these things? The following devotional offers a perspective that I ask you to consider today, in the midst of your sad or celebratory moments. Stephanie P.

          “In normal life your celebrations don’t usually intersect with your sad times and your sad times aren’t typically your times of celebration. When you’re sad, you don’t really feel like celebrating anything much. The opposite is also true; when you’re celebrating, you don’t want your good spirits dampened by reasons to be sad. We try our best to keep our sadness and our celebration separate.          

          It just makes life less complicated.

          But Jesus has called us to be a sadly celebratory community or a celebratory sad community. Now why is this true? It’s true because Jesus calls you to a life of uncompromising honesty and a life of unchallenged hope. If you’re going to be honest, really honest, then you’re going to be sad. Why? Because you can’t be honest without recognizing the horrible legacy of damage that sin has left on each one of us and on the surrounding world.

          Sin damages us, it damages our relationships, and it damages our environment. There’s nothing you’ll ever examine or experience, this side of eternity, that hasn’t been damaged in some way by sin. The destruction is so widespread it almost leaves you breathless. When you’re really honest about how broken the world actually is, you can’t help but be profoundly sad.

          Yet we’re not just called to be people of honesty, we’re called to be people of hope as well. When you begin to consider how magnificent God’s love really is, when you begin to understand how powerful his grace is, and when you begin to realize that God is right now exercising both his love and his grace so that this world would be fully and completely restored, you can’t help but celebrate. This God who’s the ultimate definition of love and wisdom won’t leave us and the surrounding world alone until we and it are fully and completely restored to what we were meant to be in the beginning.

          So we should be the saddest and most celebrant community on earth. And we should be sad and celebratory at the very same time. We’re sad because we know how bad things actually are and we celebrate because we know that the help that Jesus offers us reaches to the deepest level of our need.

          Are you sad at the condition of your world and does your sadness dance with your celebration because you also know how great God’s life-transforming grace actually is? When you take those honest looks at your world, have you remembered that God won’t quit or rest until he’s made all things new?…

          May both celebration and sadness dance in your heart to the rhythm of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and may you weep with joy and celebrate with sadness until He makes all things new once again!1″
~~Paul David Tripp

Stephanie Paul serves as part of the Addiction Recovery Team at America’s Keswick as Director of Women’s Addiction Ministry. She has been married for almost 30 years to Sesky Paul who is a graduate of the Colony of Mercy. Stephanie serves alongside him as Care Group leaders in their church. They have two grown children.
Her single focus in ministry at Keswick is to image Christ in grace and truth to wounded and hurting women, encouraging them to make Jesus the truest Lover of their soul and the One in whom all hope lies.
1 http://paultripp.com/wednesdays-word