1-31-22 Daily Dig

A Door That Opens Both Ways Stephanie Bennett What is joy but that tiny flickering flame that lights up the human soul? It’s something so inexplicable, so hard to describe – yet, as they say, we know it when we see it. Sometimes it appears on the face of a child when she watches a butterfly land on a daisy. Or it sits somewhere deep in our bones when the cries of a long-awaited new babe bring us to tears after a strenuous labor. It’s a funny thing, joy. If we savor it and let ourselves truly feel it we might imagine that nothing could ever be as intensely present, but the fact is, the door of joy opens both ways. When we let the joy in we are hardly aware we have also entered a doorway that leads to the deepest pain one can know when that joy is taken away. Emma Meier discovers her son’s final gift to her.