You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy, that I might sing praises to you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever! (Psalm 30:11-12 NLT) 

This verse is one that has been on my heart recently. Turning grief into joy is a continuous, confusing, painful process, and in my personal experience, one that isn’t pretty. To mourn, to grieve, can be so all-consuming that the idea of joy feels like an impossible thing.

Luckily, we serve a God that flourishes in the impossible.

In less than a month (as I’m writing this), it will be one year since my step-mom passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. She married my dad when I was eight and has been my second mom ever since. Since the loss, joy has become something that I experience differently now; because joy is something that you can’t help but want to share with others, and she is still one of the first people that I want to share my joy with. So, most of the time, my joy is accompanied by tears.

And the more I’ve meditated on this verse, the more I think that the point isn’t having one or the other (grief OR joy), but to have both. By turning mourning into joyful dancing, I can cry and smile and sob and dance all at once. It doesn’t mean that the grief will dissolve or that there will be no more tears; it means that God is making room in our hearts for both — that there is always room in our hearts for both when we have the foundation of a grateful heart.

The last thing I want to say is that I believe grief can be just as powerful a testimony as joy.

When I got the phone call that my step-mom had passed, I was out running errands after work and was barely able to make it back to my car before I was inconsolable. I sobbed for about thirty minutes before I was able to calm down enough to start driving to meet up with family and figure out next steps. And for that entire forty-five-minute drive, I sang praise music as much as I could through the tears — because I knew that I needed God to hold me in that moment, and I knew that I still loved him and would praise him even though I could barely form words through my pain.

This moment of receiving the worst news of my life is also one where I’ve felt the most solid in my faith, and I truly don’t have any explanation for it except that God is a God of impossible things. So, for anyone who feels like joy is an impossible thing right now, that’s okay. If you’ll let him, God can make room in your heart for joy, and in the meantime, he will never stop holding you through the tears.