Our God Will See Us ThroughSample

NEVER GET TIRED

By Clay Finnesand

There is a time for everything. A time for mourning and a time for dancing.

I can’t help but notice an imbalance in my life, though.

I tend to dwell on the negative. There’s something about the sad, the troubling, and the painful that feels almost more real than the joyful. As if joy is just air. And sadness—mourning—is the very ground I stand on.

When we are tired, weary, or in the pit of despair, the notion of joy can feel out of reach. It may feel like a fairy tale—like it’s untrue. Impossible. And when someone tries to prematurely pull us out of a low space without regard for a time of mourning, it feels insensitive and potentially even cruel.

King David knew his fair share of weariness, confusion, and desperation. He knew what it was like to fear for his life, to lose loved ones, and to suffer the consequences of his own sin.

In Psalm 18, David wrote how difficult things got when his life was being threatened:

The ropes of death entangled me; floods of destruction swept over me. The grave wrapped its ropes around me; death laid a trap in my path. (Psalm 18:4-5 NLT)

But still, this broken man with all the reason in the world to throw hope in the trash could not and would not resign to mourning being any more real than the joy of the Lord. Despite all the pain, David writes in the very next verse:

But in my distress I cried out to the Lord; yes, I prayed to my God for help. He heard me from his sanctuary; my cry to him reached his ears. (Psalm 18:6 NLT)

Perhaps you, like David, have experienced more than your fair share of grief and loss. Maybe you’re walking through a dark night of the soul where nothing makes sense. You need direction; you need comforting—but to be real… Those things feel so far off.

Perhaps the time has come to cry out to God. Maybe the time has come to remember that joy does stillexist. The time is coming where sadness and mourning must step aside, because it’s not their time anymore.

Or, as King David wrote in Psalm 30:

You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy, that I might sing praises to you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever! (Psalm 30:11–12 NLT)

I don’t know about you, but my heart skips a beat when I think of the times God turned my great sadness into something impossibly beautiful.

The joy of the Lord can be our strength, and it’s just as real as the mourning we feel. Even more so. His joy can be the ground we stand on. Sadness is real, but not more real than the hope of Christ.

God is the most real being in existence. There is reason to trust in him over what we face in the immediate. His love is working all things together for good. If that’s true, may we never get tired of singing his praise.

I can’t thank you enough.

Yes, there is a time for mourning. But let us not forget: There is a time for dancing as well.

Maybe it’s time to try it out today.