“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand. There is no going back. There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep.That have taken hold.” —Frodo, LOTR

We can’t avoid pain and disappointment, but it’s something else to enter into the blackest part of it, continue the journey in the midst of it, and come through. It requires death to “self,” as in, the instinctual part of us that forfeits what’s best for whatever’s good enough, or at least, familiar.

When something so alive in us—something we felt had to be—isn’t realized, we have to let go our idea of it, or, lose our soul, bit by bit. Letting go is a sweet sadness. There’s freedom in it. Freedom that’s unimaginable while we hold on tightly.

“I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life”—if we’ll seek Jesus through our deepest disappointments and past them, we’ll find—at last—the reality of His risen life more than reason enough to continue on.

“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” —C.S. Lewis

John 14:6