Life is fragile and all too brief. According to the Psalmist, our lifetimes are a “mere breath.” We may perhaps live into our seventies or eighties “by reason of strength,” but our experience is generally full of “toil and trouble” (Ps. 39:5; Ps. 90:10). Sometimes life leaves you weeping in the dark. In such moments of misery, we cry out to a Father who cares about our pain, who invites us into his presence to express our concerns (Matt. 7:7–11; 1 Pet. 5:7).

The doctor said, “The child has severe hemophilia.” In the crib looking up at me with charming brown eyes lay a beautiful baby boy. A “severe” hemophiliac. My son. Emotions swirled. “Are you sure?” I asked, feeling helpless. “Yes,” he responded.

Much of life happens before you are ready. Our hearts race and our minds search for meaning, but some circumstances resist explanation. So it was for me on that day, surrounded by the beeping ambience of the neonatal unit. Powerless, I simply stood and watched.

However, despair is not the end of the story. It is simply the occasion when our spiritual senses are awakened to behold new, life-giving dimensions of God’s presence. In Jesus’s words, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”

The shocking, even scandalous, ring to this statement hits you in the face. Blessed? How can Jesus possibly say that those who mourn are blessed? In her book On Death and Dying, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Nowhere in her list are blessed and comfort. But perhaps they should be.

Life in the kingdom, after all, is not about striving for happiness or avoiding the ills of human existence that bring us face to face with mourning. It’s about receiving and finding, even amid the pain and suffering of life (Eph. 1:3; James 1:17). “Blessed” is therefore not an achievement, an attitude, or an emotion. It is the tangible gift of God’s loving embrace, an identity in Christ that experiences life as it ought to be—even when we mourn.

In the months leading up to Angela’s delivery, I was a seminarian teaching Matthew’s Gospel in Sunday school. My wife, great with child, sat in the front listening attentively. One morning, I introduced my students to a concept called the “upsilon vector.”

A Counterintutive Pattern

Upsilon is a Greek letter that looks like the English capital U (or like a Y when it’s capitalized). Its contours trace the trajectory of Jesus’s experience in terms of his descent into apparent defeat (suffering and dying on the cross) before ascending three days later in consummate victory (in the resurrection). It is the counterintuitive pattern of Christian life that my seminary professor, Royce Gruenler, outlined when he stated, “We can expect to follow the same path of defeat and death, victory and resurrection.”

We observe the upsilon’s ironic pattern in nature, from the changing of the seasons to the kernel of wheat that falls to the ground and dies before it produces fruit. It’s also found in the great stories of antiquity, as when Persephone must first descend into the underworld and marry Hades before spring can be reborn.

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