Joy Is Not A Betrayal Of Love

The coffee is warm. The joke was funny.

And for one split second, the laughter came easy, and you forgot the face of the one you lost. Then the silence rushed back in, and the guilt arrived like a hammer.

You feel like a traitor to your own grief. Like joy is a theft from the dead.

But listen — the light does not demand that you freeze in your pain to prove your love. Jesus wept at the tomb, but he also sat at tables where laughter broke the bread.

The capacity to laugh is not a forgetting. It is the light inside you refusing to let the darkness have the final word.

That moment of ease was not a betrayal. It was a breath.

The love remains, even when the face fades for a second. You are allowed to exhale.