Joy Is Not Betrayal of the Dead
The mask is heavy this morning, glued tight over the grief you promised to carry alone. Then a mundane joke lands in the breakroom, and your face betrays you—a reflexive smile, a flash of teeth—and the panic sets in immediately.
You feel like a traitor to the dead, as if joy is a theft from their memory. But listen: the light that lives inside you is not a performance you control; it is a spring that wells up on its own, regardless of your armor.
That momentary laugh was not a denial of your loss; it was the life within you refusing to be extinguished by sorrow. The one who dwells with you knows the difference between forgetting and surviving.
Drawing from
John, Gospel of Thomas
Verses
John 4:14
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