How Can You Laugh When You Know I'm Down....

With a discrete nod to an early Beatles song, Frank Turk had this posting on Phil Johnson's excellent blog, Pyromaniacs. It's a great article. If you have the time, read the whole thing. It put my day in persepctive:

I'm not much of a complainer in my personal life – mostly because I have kids who are way better than I could have possibly raised them, I have a wife who is infinitely a better person and a better spouse than I am, I make a decent living, somehow blogging has panned out for me as a way to write thing which people will then actually read, and most importantly, I have a savior in Jesus Christ.

Now, many segments of the blogosphere will read a post which begins like that and simply write it off as hash – because, frankly, they are actually complainers. Life is very hard for them, Jesus doesn’t turn out to give them what they think they want, and so on. And people see that as transparency, somehow – that if one can vent one's disappointment or talk about how hard they have it today, that's real emotional honesty, and we should raise a glass to the thick hide it takes to tell people that COMPONENT X of my life makes me sad.

And I bring this up because the last 10 days for me has been frankly emotionally and spiritually draining. I'm down. I'm really down. How can you laugh when you know I'm down? How can you laugh? When you know I'm down?

Ahem.

So should I blog about the valley of the shadow of death? I mean – as I have tried to find a way to summarize it, the last week has looked a lot like the first chapter of Job, sans the marauding Sabeans and the donkeys. And, thankfully, the boils.

Do you really want to read about that? Would it be edifying to know that my week was as bad or worse than yours was?

Let me suggest something here, and then try to work it out: these are important things, and they are the things we think about every day. But is thinking about them – and listening to the litany of my immediate state of woe – edifying or uplifting? Or is there something else we should be comparing all that stuff to so that when that stuff happens, we don’t find ourselves shipwrecked?

You can read the rest of the article here