HEARTACHE HAPPENS

I feel sad today. It's more complex than my ability to express or fathom. I suppose it's the result of a sober awareness that this life is often not as it was intended to be, and in many respects not as I expected or hoped it would be. Some things lost. Some things never found. Other things found and subsequently lost. Still other things found that would have been better left lost. For now at least, I'm just going to allow myself the space to be sad...the license to mourn. I hope that's OK with you. Besides, I question the legitimacy of any claimed joy that refuses to acknowledge the reality and validity of occasional heartache. So, I thought I'd take a few moments to share some quotes on the subject of sadness that have given me pause for thought. Here they are...

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.” Robert Goolrick

“When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.” Yann Martel

“I have been smashed and put back together so many times nothing works right. Nothing is where it should be, heavy thumping in my shoulder where my heart now beats.” Elizabeth Scott

“There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well.” Nicholas Sparks

“The trouble with a great sadness is that it doesn't fit inside your body." Manuel Rivas

"The world has not yet seen what God can do with a man who gives both halves of a broken heart to him. And I don't doubt that a man like that can change the world...or at least a little part of it.” Chris Fabry

"I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me." Sting

"I think often sadness is a great place to get songs from." Sarah McLachlan

"I've cried, and you'd think I'd be better for it, but the sadness just sleeps, and it stays in my spine the rest of my life." Conor Oberst

“But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us?” C.S. Lewis

“Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unaswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.” C.S. Lewis