Matt’s Marvelous Mailbag seeks to provide marginally adequate answers to much better questions about politics, economics, social life, theology, or any potpourri you see fit to have answered. Send questions to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com.  

Perhaps this isn’t a great excuse, but I have gone through quite a bout of travel in recent days, hence the lack of a formal mailbag this week. Next week, we shall resume our querying and answering at full capacity. However, I feel duty bound to offer something brief for this week for consistency’s sake, and I hope you’ll find it within yourself to tolerate the brief change in tone, as I offer what I hope is some encouragement.

I spent yesterday with some mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was one of the best Easter celebrations I have ever been blessed to experience, full of joy and merriment with close friends and family as we celebrated Christ’s resurrection. Yet, at the same time, a specter loomed large over the whole day from the moment I woke up and read the news of the bombings in Sri Lanka; the death toll is nearing 300, and many more have been injured. On the day that is for so many the high point of joy and celebration, that same joy will now be blemished for life. This is not the first time either that such Easter attacks have marred the occasion, and I doubt they will be the last.

Moments like these remind us why it is fitting to develop a tragic view of life, not despairing, but tragic. A day so pure and good as Easter isn’t meant to be associated death and suffering. Families are not meant to be split apart so viciously and painfully. Indeed, from the Bible’s first pages, we learn that death itself is an entity without welcome and a problem that was never meant to be. For Christians, we know the hope that awaits us, but the pain remains unmistakably real and present. We do not despair, but we grieve with weight we were never meant to carry, and that is tragic.

Yet, at the same yesterday, I saw life in expressly tangible ways throughout my own day. I saw it in the faces of people at church who heard the gospel in message and music, as hundreds gathered in our church to rejoice. I saw it on the faces of a mother and son our family brought to Easter dinner, who had shown up to town with no friends and few goods and now praised God that they had not spent the day alone. I saw it on the faces of our family as we shared one of the best Easters in recent memory together. I see it now on my face as I reflect on the elation of our time together.

Neither ignorant optimism nor debilitating pessimism will do to capture the full picture of life, and the same goes for yesterday. Both the tragedy and triumph are intensely real, and we simply have no way to account and control for the complete image right now. But, thank God, that burden is never asked of us. What is asked is merely that we walk humbly with God and perform the acts of charity pertinent to our own spheres of influence, looking to the future only so much as it informs us of our duty for the present. What we can do, as followers of Christ, is to live daily in the life we are given, weeping with those who weep and laughing with those who laugh. As you go forth from yesterday, let that tension remain and bear patiently your own delights and disasters as they come to you. The tragedy is real, but may it never cloud God’s own immanent goodness and life to us. Go forth in that reality and remember this, brothers and sisters…

You are loved.