Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. While we are in this life, we have in ourselves

a marvelous mixture of both happiness and sorrow.

We remain in this state all the days of our lives, but Christ wants us to trust that he is

perpetually with us. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of divine love.

The prophet Isaiah describes the servant of the Lord this way. He is despised and rejected of men,

a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. I take comfort in the idea that God chose to inhabit

this fractured world of ours, that Jesus willingly took on a body vulnerable to the common cold,

stomach flus, and the violence of hateful

people. I do not know why our world is as broken as it is, or why God lets it be that way,

but I know that God has not chosen indifference to our pain, but solidarity. And there's something

else I love about this verse. The word acquainted. It makes grief sound like a person Jesus knew, someone he talked with sometimes.

It makes me think that if sorrow passed Jesus in the street, he would recognize it. Are you acquainted with grief?

Hello, everybody, and welcome to our second episode in the aggressively happy podcast series.

For the next few weeks, we will be exploring the themes drawn out in my book, Aggressively

Happy, A Realist Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life.

And this week, we're exploring the theme of the first chapter, which is titled Befriend Sadness. So I have boiled myself a

cup of tea and I'm excited to sit down and discuss this chapter with you. Now, I should say that what I will be doing this podcast is not just kind of

going over what's in the chapter. I think that I put some of my ideas about this in writing in a way

that I can't explore just speaking. I think that there's kind of an artistry to writing that I hope

will give you something that I can't give you just through talking

...