Joy and Sorrow with Abbey Wedgeworth
On today’s episode, we’re chatting about joy and sorrow with our dear friend, Abbey Wedgeworth. Abbey Wedgeworth is a wife, mom, and writer located on the South Carolina coast. She is passionate about Bible literacy and discipleship and loves to see how the gospel transforms how people think and live. Abbey is the author of Held: 31 Biblical Reflections on God’s Comfort and Care in the Sorrow of Miscarriage, the host of the Held podcast, and the curator of the annual Gentle Leading Advent Devotional for Moms.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Can you tell us a little about who you are and what you do?
What makes it difficult for us to do life together in joy and sorrow?
What are some common scenarios where women might feel this tension?
What wisdom does God’s Word offer to us as we seek to love women who are in a different season than we are?
How does the gospel enable us to be connected to God in the midst of our various joys and hardships?
How does being connected to God change the way we engage with others, even if they're in a season that might be challenging for us to move towards?
What are some ways that you personally have had to navigate this tension?
What have you learned as a result of this?
NOTEWORTHY QUOTES
Abbey’s heart behind her ministry: “Helping people apply the riches of Christ to the realities of life.”
“Envy can make you think of another person… ‘you have the thing I want, therefore you are responsible for my pain.’”
“Isolation: we can feel like no one understands what we are going through. No one has ever felt what I feel, so we pull away because we feel so disappointed before we even step up to the plate, relationally. We can be isolated by our pain.”
“In the church sometimes it doesn’t feel safe to weep, even though it should be the safest place to weep.”
“How are we to treat other members of the body? Love one another, bear with one another, consider one another more important than yourselves, serve one another, forgive one another… there is so much sacrifice and humility required when we approach other people in the body of Christ.”
“Weeping and rejoicing with one another, these things happen all at once, and there is beauty that emerges out of that tension.”
“Being familiar with the story of Scripture as a whole helps us to embrace the present reality of the fallen world that we live in, but also acknowledge what we possess through the finished work of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit and all the ways he’s equipped us. It also just turns our gaze to the promise of what he has secured for us, the inheritance that is ahead. So we live our lives with a longer view into eternity. Being aware of the fallenness of this world helps us to not be surprised by our own suffering or the actions of others or suffering in the lives of others. We expect it. It’s a reality that we become not less grieved by, but more comfortable with as we experience it. And we recognize that we need to arm ourselves for it.”
“The church needs your season. We need people who are joyful, whose stories we know so that we can look up in suffering and say, ‘this is not all there is.’ The Lord does beautiful things in the lives of people, he’s doing beautiful things in my suffering and I can see that on the face of my sister who just walked out of a season of suffering.”
“If we are in a season of suffering, the church needs our tears to learn how to be a safe place to weep and in order to fulfill the law of Christ by bearing our burden. It’s part of the design.”
“Living in light of eternity helps us to not view our circumstances or our gifts or our comfort as ultimate.”
“We can still grieve the loss of people, the loss of dreams, but we grieve with hope, and that changes things.”
“Knowing Christ changes our ‘if onlys’ to ‘even ifs.’ Even if this is forever, I still will have joy in Christ.”
“When we embrace God’s Word, we don’t see our world as our kingdom anymore, so when we live our lives for the sake of the glory of God, worshipping him as king, then we view people primarily as characters in his story more than characters in our own. So, if we follow that, we stop viewing other people’s suffering in terms of our own.”
“Recognizing and embracing God’s sovereignty. He is the one who gives and takes away and who ordains our seasons. He works through individual lives and circumstances.”
“God works in the tiniest details to do the greatest things, so we can trust him in our season and in his sovereignty over the season of another.”
“He is good and his will is perfect.”
“His way is perfect, the law of the Lord proves true. All his ways are righteous, all his works are kind, whether that means my womb is empty or full, whether that means I’m single or married, whether I’m waiting or experiencing abundance. The Word of God is essential to learning how to walk with one another.”
“Through Christ, we have access in one spirit to the Father. The curtain is torn. He wins us that access, which is amazing. In him and through him, by faith in him, we can enter God’s presence with boldness and confidence (Eph. 3). He wins us that access to God.”
“In so many cases in Scripture, we see this access to God and peace with him is spoken of in connection with peace and rejoicing, being joyful in hope, being patient in affliction, being persistent in prayer. That matters in our rootedness, that connection with God matters because it’s a tether that, even if we find ourselves tossed about by the storms of life or whether we find ourselves in joy or sorrow, the most important rooting factor in our life is our connectedness with him and our security in him.”
“Our access to God cannot be broken (Rom. 8:31-39) by our joy or our pain. Nothing can separate us from him and from his love if we are in Christ.”
“In joy, we remember that he moved towards us when we were unlovable and unworthy. So we love who he loves. If we are in Christ, we pay attention to who he touches and moves towards and we move towards those people: the weary, the downtrodden, the broken, the sorrowful. Those are the people Christ spent time with in his ministry.”
“We don’t idolize our comfort when we are in relationship with the comforter, but we extend what we’ve known in him to others, and if he’s put us in a position of abundance, we use that abundance for his glory and we give out of it.”
“We are perfectly known and understood and accepted in Christ.”
“We are near to Christ in that place, nothing can separate us from the love of God, but I think we can know it in a really unique and special way when we’re suffering, because we have a suffering savior who is acquainted with our suffering.”
“God works in joy and in sorrow and allows us to comfort one another through the comfort we have experienced through him.”
“Those places where you feel uncomfortable or challenged relationally are opportunities. He’s bringing you low, they’re opportunities to see your need for him, to ask for his help. Anytime we ask for his help we have the joy of getting to see him help us.”
“‘Make me poor and keep me low, seeking only Thee to know.’ It’s a gift when he does that. It’s a gift in your joy when you remember that that’s a blessing, when you remember that nothing is sure… There’s nothing sweeter than when God helps you assume the posture of depending on him.”
“Walking alongside one another in different seasons has also taught me the truer reality of my connectedness with Christ.”
“When the thing that I’m hoping for comes, the perils of plenty, when I get what I was wanting, in that season I can say ‘You’re sweeter, Jesus. You’re just as real and just as good here, and not just because of the blessings but because of what you’ve given me through your finished work.’”
“We can be honest about good things being hard and hard things being good, we have that freedom in Jesus.”
RESOURCES
The Psalms - a good commentary or study on the Psalms
If you're in a joyous season - What Grieving People Wish You Knew by Nancy Guthrie
If you're in a hard circumstance - The Envy of Eve by Melissa Kruger
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
How does the gospel enable you to be connected to God in the midst of your various joys and hardships?
How does being connected to God change the way you engage with others, even if they are in a different season than you?
What are some ways you have had to navigate the tension of sharing both joy and sorrow with other members of the body of Christ?
What passages of Scripture can serve to point you to the gospel in the midst of both joy and sorrow?
What are you going to do or implement as a result of what you’ve learned this week?
IMPORTANT NOTE
Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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