Solomon wrote that. Proverbs 14:13. He was not being dramatic.
You laughed this week. You meant it. The ache underneath did not move.
We are not always glad when we smile. The face says one thing. The deep of the soul says another. There is a moan down there that you alone know about.
The wicked laugh too. The Bible calls it the crackling of thorns under a pot. A quick sound. A little heat. Then the cold comes back and the night closes in around the fire.
That kind of laughing fixes nothing.
We were born into a world of sorrow.
It started in a garden. To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception." To the man, "in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life."
So a woman loves a child. Carries that child. Wraps her whole life around that child. And the love comes wrapped in sorrow.
A man goes to work. Maybe a job he likes. And the work comes with sorrow too. Some days a thumb under a hammer. Some days the bills, the bad back, the people who let you down.
Nobody gets out clean. That is the curse.
Most of the sorrow in any room is hidden.
It does not come up in conversation. It burrows down and lives there. The years make it different. The years do not make it gone.
Ask a grieving mother if it gets better. She will not say yes. She will say it gets different. You learn to carry it.
There is the sorrow of betrayal. A stranger's insult slides off. It is the friend that wounds. "But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company."
That pain sticks for years. It makes a man slow to trust again.
There is the sorrow of watching the people you love. When your children are small they step on your toes. When they grow they step on your heart. Paul carried it for kinsmen who would not come to Christ. "Great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart." You watch someone you love walk toward a cliff. You cannot stop them until they are willing. That leaves you sorrowful.
Some sorrow can be hidden. One cannot.
Hopelessness cannot be hid. It does not always scream at the graveside. Sometimes it just goes quiet. The man who cannot get out of bed. Who sits in a daze while the people who love him are talking. The pain is too deep to reach.
When a Christian loses hope, he loses everything. Hope in the Bible is not a dice roll. It is expectation. It rests on a promise God cannot break.
David said the billows go over him. You cannot fight the ocean forever. Eventually you sink.
And then there is a sorrow that is healthy.
Godly sorrow. The sorrow over your own sin. "For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death."
You do not get it cleaned up until you and the Lord are talking about the same thing.
A man who never admits his part stays where the wound found him. Sixty years old and still twenty on the inside. You do not grow past what you will not name.
So look at the Man of sorrows.
Isaiah called Him that. A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. He knew loss. He knew betrayal. He knew what it was to say a true thing and watch men refuse it. Above all He knew what it was to not be understood, for no one grasped the heart of God in the flesh.
He has been to the bottom you are afraid of.
And do one thing.
A small boat will ride the swells a long time. It does not sink from the storm. It sinks when it fills. The water comes over the side a little at a time, and a man either bails or he goes down with it.
There is always a little water in the boat. A sorrow that never fully leaves. Fine. But when the billows come over and the grief is filling you up, you have to bail.
You have to pour it out.
Sorrow heard is sorrow helped.
Pour it out to God first. That is what the Psalms are for. David, over and over. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me." That is a man bailing.
Then let one trusted friend carry some of it. "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ."
Not on Facebook. Not in anger on your kids. You find one good, trusted soul, and you pour it out, and you let the Lord help you.
The Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save. You can sink seven miles down and His arm still reaches the bottom.
So bail a little.
Adam
If you know someone carrying a sorrow they have told no one, send them this. Sorrow heard is sorrow helped. You might be the one who hears it.
And if you have never poured your sin out to Jesus Christ and let His blood wash it, do not wait for a better day. There is not one coming. Pour it out to Him now.
And if you want to read your Bible the way this reads it — plain, no fog, no scholar standing between you and the words — that is the whole reason I built Plain Bible 2.0.
The Biblical Man is where this gets said plain every week, sword out. If today landed, that's the door.
