This morning I walked up the steps to our office. Sitting on the porch were two women talking. One I've known for more than a decade. I remember walking her through a hard time of great growth. I looked at her blog about it.

Sometimes we don’t know exactly what we are working towards.

We don’t know when we are going to get there.

We can’t see the end.

Every time we think we are nearing the top, the mountain keeps stretching on.

But we keep climbing.

We trust that whatever God has for us on the other side of that mountain —whenever we get there — is going to be worth it.

And it is.

She was learning to trust - to trust God in new ways. And it was so gratifying to see God meet her in that place. This morning, I knew that they were talking about this subject of trust. And having seen that it was worth it, I knew the first woman would be able to deeply encourage the second woman.

The issue at stake is that trust has been abused. Instead of finding safety, the trust and vulnerability resulted in wounding.

I have been in that place of betrayal and the invitation to bitterness. God's grace to me was that he gave me a clear choice: I could either agree to welcome bitterness into my heart, or I could quickly and irrationally choose to forgive and to again trust my broken heart to God as my protector.

And on the heels of that, I learned that I needed to grieve. I needed to recognize the trust that I'd lost and grieve the relational wreckage that ensued. It was hard. But it was grace.

Grief is never something we go looking for.  But to push grief away, to refuse to feel its depths and bury its effects where they can’t touch you is to limit your ability to be free in joy when it comes.  It’s the emotional equivalent of folding your arms across your body, holding yourself in more tightly.

And here's the problem with that posture: You were made to fly and folded arms can’t fly.

When Henri Nouwen says “joy and sorrow are the parents of our spiritual growth,” he’s hit upon a huge issue.  Grief exists with joy on a continuum. Try to limit the grief in your life by walling it off when bad things happen, and you’ll also limit the joy you can feel.  It’s a spiritual principle.

To expand the range of joy in your life, you have to fully process the grief you experience.  But embracing grief is a costly thing.  Ask Jesus.  “A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” He bore all our sorrows – physically carried them in his body on the cross so that we could never again say “God, You have no idea how I feel.”

Yet the book of Hebrews also says He was anointed with the oil of joy. My guess is He is probably the most joyful person who ever lived.

Like stretching out your muscles and your taut nerves in your body when you have been physically out of action for a while, it hurts. Processing and embracing grief always hurts.

The currents of Jesus's compassion are the winds beneath you, the strong eagle’s wings that swoop beneath the baby eagle struggling to learn to fly, catching and carrying. (Isaiah 40:27-31)

To feel extremes does not make you extreme, but ultimately more whole.  It’s what you do with what you feel that makes the difference.