Weeping at Night, Joy in the Morning

This past Sunday, I found myself at Luther Place, a nice church in central DC. It was bound to happen as several of my friends are luther PK (Pastor's kids). 

The sermon was by Pastor Karen (Sorry I wrote down her full name but tossed out the program after the final "amen!")

The psalm she quoted resonated with me for personal and global conflict. 

 Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning.

This resonated with me because it reminded me of all the times we make decisions when we are in the proverbial "night", when we really ought to wait until the muddied waters have settled. 

We draft policy, make decisions about people, sign contracts, and create rules too often from the place of weeping in the night. Now, I do acquiesce that there are times when this make sense. There is a difference from a decision coming from a place of sadness and one coming from that deep place, that place you get to when you say "I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" and you do what you do...throw out the foods that make your organs rot or stand up for yourself etc. 

But this is usually not the place from whence our decisions come, politically and personally. We too often make them from our weeping, not trusting that the joy will return and with that a new clarity about how to proceed. Reading the IChing is a good thing to do when we find ourselves weeping over the conflicts we're handling (personal or global). It's a good thing because it's so confusing, it slows down any rash decision making. It never really takes me to joy, at least so far, but it reminds me that for everything there is a season and that making decisions impulsively in a weak state, rarely does much for anyone. 

If you're reading this, you've lived life long enough to know the boomerang effect of decisions made from your weeping versus those from your joy. We're launching these boomerangs all day while we're living into the ones we threw last week, last month, last year.  

So, I guess the moral of this post, if there is one, is to not make a decision while we're crying about the boomerang that hit us in the head. Take a deep breath and wait for joy, she'll know what to do. 

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