The trick about writing a pouring out post like my last is that as soon as I write it and hear from all you, I don’t feel that way anymore. You lift my burden with your comments, your emails, your texts, your thoughts. Thank you.

Aside from my emotional state, Brad feels better this month, too. He’s taking a few new supplements for his gut and his cellular metabolism and has more energy lately than I think I’ve ever seen from him in our married life. He’s working out again! The swelling in his knees is going up and down again. We might have the beginnings of health for him and I am so so so relieved.

And with that happy frame of mind, I read Stephen Colbert’s profile in GQ this morning.

I didn’t know this, but his dad and two brothers died in a plane crash when he was 10. He suffered. But this is the astounding thing he says about it now:

I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

He explains that he feels gratitude for that tragedy. It gave him a worldview. He watched his mom live broken, but not bitter:

He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity.

I’m standing at my desk reading and nodding because Stephen Colbert gets it. He gets that at the bottom of suffering is so much joy. Joy that you’re carried by people who love you. Joy that you’re held tight forever by the One who saves. Joy that this isn’t all there is. This has never been all there is.

It sounds crazy because it is crazy: I’m happy Brad and I are going through this. These ups and downs will make us and bring us, broken but not bitter, to Paradise. OR TO THE LATE SHOW because obviously Stephen Colbert and I are interchangeable at this point.

photo taken at the Denver Botanic Gardens