Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

Psalm 139:8 KJV

God present in pain as truly as in joy.

One of my favorite authors is Henri Nouwen, that wise and gentle Dutchman who lived with a community of the mentally disabled. When he planned to join John and me and several other writers on Cape Cod for a few days of sharing, I looked forward to meeting him at last.

Illness made him cancel those plans, an illness from which he did not recover. Because there were so many questions I'd wanted to ask him, I read with special eagerness his last book, published the month before he died.

In Can You Drink the Cup? Nouwen writes of "the Cup of Sorrow."

Famine, epidemics, child prostitution, in his global travels Nouwen had grieved over all of them. He lived daily with the sorrows of the mentally handicapped. And he had his own times of depression and doubt.

"There was a time," he wrote, "when I said, 'Next year I will finally have it together,' or 'When I grow more mature these moments of inner darkness "will go.'"

Christian maturity - this was the very subject I'd hoped to ask him about! I too was always waiting for unwanted traits to fall away. Someday I wouldn't have these cyclic depressions. Someday I'd be more outgoing. Someday I'd get my desk cleaned up.

"But now I know," Nouwen continued, "that my sorrows are mine and will not leave me."

I read the words with dismay. Here was a modern-day saint who to the very end of his life could not eliminate the negatives in his personality. "The adolescent struggle to find someone to love me... unfulfilled needs for affirmation... sorrow that I have not become who I wanted to be. They are very old and very deep sorrows and no amount of optimism will make them less."

But there's a surprise about this Cup, Nouwen went on. "The cup of sorrow, inconceivable as it seems, is also the cup of joy." He could not explain the mystery; he could only experience it. "In the midst of the sorrows is consolation, in the midst of the darkness is light, in the midst of the despair is hope."

In the midst... simultaneously... in the very worst moment. I thought of John in the ICU. Thought of the darkest times in my own life, and saw myself at such moments turning to God, gaining compassion, growing.