Life is Bittersweet - Part 1

I am in the habit of listening to the news headlines in the morning just to be up to date with some of the big stories in my country and around the world. Everyday I listen I am struck by how negative it is, pretty much all the news is these. I know that very rarely do the feel good stories make it to the news but still it paints a bleak picture. I chat to people in my life friends and family and there too are the major headlines negative people living with severe mental health challenges, financial pressure in an economy like south Africa’s that doesn’t seem to show any signs of moving in a positive direction any time soon.

I also have a habit of following some cool pages on instagram that focus on spreading stories of good news and people just being good humans. I have many friends celebrating milestones like the birth of a child, the purchase of a home or a graduation etc. There seems to be this good and bad in the lives of those around me.

What is even more interesting to me is that some of the best things in peoples lives and the worst things can be happening simultaneously. This is a hard reality to live in and I often find so jarring. I was reminded on a call with a friend that this is the nature of life in a lot of ways, things aren’t this or that but often they are this and that. I was reminded of Susan Cains work on this idea which she called Bittersweet.

Her definition of Bitterseet is:

‘A tendency to states of longing, poignancy and sorrow, an acute awareness of passing time and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.’

The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and darkness, birth, and death, bitter and sweet are forever paired together. The bittersweet is the amazingly challenging tension of the very essence of life as we know it.

I think this is such a helpful framework and lense to process life through as it doesn’t negate one or the other but it holds in healthy tension the both and of life. I also love this framework because I see so much of it in the writings we find in the book of Psalm. So many of those songs and prayers have this idea of the both and nature of life written throughout them as people of God over the years have had to wrestle with it all.

Thats the first thought I want to share with all of us as we walk through this life and faith journey. Life is bitter sweet. Faith is bitter sweet. When it is jarring for us to try live what can be advertised as this overly positive faith, the journey of people of faith in the text is one of learning to chew and appreciate both side of the coin. The bitter and the sweet are what make life and faith what they are. It will serve us well to learn to embrace that.

As we continue with this series of blogs I will share some practices I have learnt to be able to hopefully process well the bittersweet of life that I hope will help you thrive in life and faith.