Sorrow is underrated in our culture. We don’t like to be sorrowful and try to avoid it like the plague. When sorrow hits us and we truly feel regret for something we did, or we are grieving because of something that happened to us, our goal is to get past it and move forward as soon as possible. Nobody likes to live with sorrow. We would much rather have joy in our lives.

I've been doing some study in the book of James, and I ran across this startling verse: "Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom" (James 4:9). Talk about a buzzkill. What are we supposed to do with that. Our natural response is probably to ask “Why?”

Why would anybody want to deliberately stop laughing and start mourning? Isn’t laughter the best medicine and the perfect way to deal with our present troubles? Didn’t James himself say in the opening to his letter that we are to “count it all joy” when we encounter trials? Yes he did, but apparently James believes the path to that joy comes not through laughter, but through sorrow. It's taken me a while for this to sink in, but I think I know what he means.

I had this friend named Collette.  I met her in a creative writing class at my junior college.  As I recall she had written a story which turned out to be a thinly veiled story about herself, in which the main character was dealing with some conflict with her husband.  I mentioned in the feedback that the story was frightening, to see such a clear example of spousal abuse, and she came and talked to me afterward, to ask if I really thought what she had written about constituted abuse.  I told her I thought it did, and in some mysterious way this caused us to become friends.  That's my first memory of Collette.