At a recent staff meeting, Christ Church Communications Content Coordinator Lexie Trader shared this devotion. It spoke deeply to us. I hope it will speak to you too.

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Back in December, I experienced a loss that completely changed my understanding of grief. My friend Andrea, who would have been 29 just a few weeks ago, died suddenly and tragically. Before this, the losses I had experienced were of people who had lived long, full lives. While they were sad, they made sense. 

But this was a different grief than I had ever known. It felt fundamentally unfair. I found myself navigating a messy rollercoaster of anger, sadness, confusion, and then anger all over again. I felt guilty on the days I woke up feeling normal and caught myself smiling, only to be pulled right back into the hurt by something as simple as a Facebook memory or a road sign for a place we had been together. 

In the moments when I’ve felt the most lost, my mind has gone back to an unlikely source of comfort: WandaVision, a Marvel superhero show, of all things. But it contains a scene that completely changed how I look at what I was experiencing.  

In this scene, Wanda Maximoff is sitting on her bed, completely devastated after the sudden, tragic loss of her twin brother. Vision, an android built of wires and artificial intelligence who is constantly trying to understand human emotion, comes into the room to sit with her.  

Attempting to explain what she is feeling, Wanda tells him, “It’s just like this wave crashing over me again and again. It knocks me down, and when I try to stand up, it just comes for me again… It’s going to drown me.” 

And he responds with what I believe is one of the most beautiful pieces of dialogue ever written: 

“Because it can’t all be sorrow, can it? I’ve always been alone, so I don’t feel the lack. It’s all I’ve ever known. I’ve never experienced loss because I’ve never had a loved one to lose… But what is grief, if not love persevering?” 

Wow. A fictional android guy in a superhero show somehow summed up one of the most complex human experiences in one simple question. He reminds us that grief and joy actually come from the same well. Wanda was drowning in sorrow because she had experienced the deep joy of loving her brother.  

Grief and joy are not opposites. Grief lives in the places where there has been immense joy. The pain we feel isn’t a sign of brokenness; it’s just all that love we still have looking for a place to go. And though it hurts, that love is never something we’d trade away. We have to allow ourselves to experience both. 

I’ve come to realize that choosing joy doesn’t mean forgetting what we’ve lost or pretending that everything is fine. We can hold the sadness of an absence in one hand and still reach for the joy of life with the other. They don’t cancel each other out. 

My hope for us today is that we can give ourselves the grace to feel it all. Remember that the heavy things we carry are just the price of having loved deeply, and that love is always worth it.  

And maybe that’s what joy really is. Not the absence of grief, but the willingness to keep noticing the good, keep opening our hearts, and keep choosing love, again and again, even as we carry it.