"It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to."

I would like to take a moment to talk about Sadness.

Yes, the character from Inside Out. But also just the emotion in general. Sadness - the emotion - is something we are all very familiar with.


Terrible things have happened in our world, especially of late, and if Inside Out taught us anything it's that it's okay to be sad. It's okay to feel grief and to cry from time to time.


Grief can be a powerful tool in leading us to recognize the true joy in our lives; but C.S. Lewis taught us something very important about using grief in his discourse "A Grief Observed."

"I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process...For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?"

Grief can be used to take us in either direction - up or down. Think of it as the spiral itself, the gear moving us the direction we want to go.







When the world witnesses a bombing, a shooting, a war, etc. do we use our grief to tear others down for the harm their actions have caused, or do we allow it to raise us up - causing us to stand again on our own two feet, and reach down to help those others who have fallen as well?

I have heard a lot recently that our nation is getting worse - that we are spiraling down into a rut from which there is no salvation - a rut that "back in my day we never would have fallen into!"

"The same leg is cut off time after time." - C.S. Lewis

"It was safer back then!"

"We're better off before guns!"

"We would NEVER have treated others that way!"







Truth alert: You did, and you still do. We all do. The world is not getting worse. "The world" is doing nothing, actually, but keeping us all alive. It is the humans who inhabit it who are making mistakes, and we are all of us just as capable of making those mistakes as our brother.

There is a lot of negativity in the world - and we are often the cause of it, but there is also a lot of good - and we can be the cause of it as well.

Satan would have you focus on the bad. Focusing on the bad makes you forget that God is there - that he cares and is guiding us toward the light every day. Focusing on the terror makes us believe that terror is all there is, but just as Joy learned (when she had literally fallen to the "bottom of the pit" and was ready to give up) - bad things often lead to good.

Focusing on the bad doesn't make it go away, but forgetting about it doesn't either.




Focusing on the light until we can no longer see the bad - no longer see it because we are no longer creating it ourselves - that is our real defense against the horrors of our times.




Let's take a moment to realize how far we have come!

Other races - on the whole - are being treated with less hatred and contempt than they were before, and great strides are achieved every day in furthering education for ALL children all over the world.
Women are being offered work in areas they were never allowed in before - just look at our government!
I don't care if you're voting for her or not: We have a woman nominee up for the Presidency, and that is an amazing thing.

America has come far. The world has come far.

But we will only continue to change for the better if we choose to spiral up instead of down.
Please don't use politics to bring others down - to point out their "faults," to tear them to the ground.
Use it to inspire others to fight for what we all want - to stand up for the good, to continue to change the world.

Bad times will come, and often we will be the bringers of it - but good times are there as well, and we hold the power to acknowledge them in our very hands.