By: Kimberly
Have you ever paused to think about what a miracle it is? Not only to exist, but to exist so well? To be a person who chooses, every day after day after day, to live and be? To love and laugh, to hurt and weep, to struggle and to soar, to remember and be remembered, to fear and ache and yearn. And then, the very next day, to do it all over again?
What a miracle that is.
Every day is a big bundle of uncertainty. We don’t know. We never know. We can plan. We can guess and speculate about what the hours ahead might hold. But we never know. Tomorrow lies ahead of us full of potential. The potential for pain is always, always there. And we know that. We’ve tasted it before. We’ve been there in that moment when the potential morphs into the pain. We’ve felt the actuality of that so many times that it seems to be a foregone conclusion. We know there will be a tomorrow with pain in it. It is one of life’s inevitabilities. We cannot choose to exist without accepting that. And yet we choose.
What a miracle that is.
We know that joy is one of Tomorrow’s potentials. We have tasted that too. Not as often, perhaps. And sometimes our very humanity seems to fight against that acknowledgment. We are too familiar with pain. It is, at times, easier to believe in. We seek joy though. Sometimes in wrong ways that take us down wrong paths to the wrong sorts of tomorrows. Sometimes though, we get it exactly right. And in those moments we teach ourselves to chase after the next tomorrow. We teach ourselves why it is that we live and strive and struggle and suffer. We learn why it is we choose to live each day. We learn what it is to be a miracle.
Joy outweighs the pain. Every time. Every single hoped for tomorrow with its burgeoning potential unfolding before us is worth the uncertainty because of the sweetness of those moments of joy. Those moments when we glimpse what we have the potential to become. Those moments when we recognize the miracle that we and our very existence are.
When we know that we are all miracles, and that there is so much more ahead of us than a mere Tomorrow.
The underlying theme of hope in your post is a great one. I think hope is part of the light of Christ given to every person born on the earth. It is very hard to squash the hope that Heavenly Father has given to us, it is painful and difficult when that does happen. Joy and hope is always there, but it can be hard to see and feel it sometimes.
It makes all the difference in life if we can support and sustain our hope and the hope of others.
I love this and I love the adorable picture of your family!
Joy does outweigh pain. Thanks for the reminder.
I think some of the sweetest moments in my life are when I realize, deep down, that joy really does outweigh the pain…and that even in the pain (and sometimes especially in (or through) the pain), God can be found, and found more intensely.