Are Christians Always Happy-Shiny People?

Image: Pexels/Wundef studios

When I walked out of that Mulago hospital ward of head-injured patients the other day, I hailed a safe Boda and insisted on having my own helmet.

My rider understood and even chuckled something along the lines of how everyone coming out of those hospital gates often pops out scared, suddenly more conscious of life, and death.

He had a point. Meanwhile, my helmet didn’t even fit.

But what I had seen inside those corridors made me endure the discomfort throughout the journey. Problem is, that feeling only took only a while. All I needed was to numb it, hours later, with a little bit of Instagram, and whatnot.

The grief of seeing stitched skulls in those wards needed to sink in, but I was eager to feed my skull something else, something trivial, shallow, perhaps to keep my head above the reality of a broken and breaking world Jesus invites me into.

And you see it over and over again when prominent people die; the country mourns, but hype churches continue declaring and decreeing.

In fact, your algorithm brings up something else for your skull too. The grief of the popular dead is plastered all over your news feed, alongside ads from your last Jumia purchase and dancing cat videos in the next post, plus some Premier League in between. Neatly packaged to keep you in the shallows.

Yet when Christ, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, knew he was going to raise his friend Lazarus, he still wept (John 11:35), the son of God and son of man, the eternal ancient of days, paused, and wiped his watery eyes.

As if remind us all,

This world is not as it should be. Remember to weep; crying is not secular. It’s okay not to glow every Sunday; it’s fine to soak in the world’s sorrow so you can encounter the world’s redeemer.

We sing “Fame youth, and beauty hurry by.” But do we truly grieve how painful that feels?

A 34 year old royal King is snuffed out by brain cancer, a wealthy businessman seeing off his kids to the airport, crashing his 4-wheel into a highway barricade. Someone’s miscarriage story enduring in that second row, at church.

A surprising classmate’s surgery, an athlete lynched to death by handbag thieves, a choir member entering the maternity ward and leaving in a body bag, and a middle-aged woman too, driving out for lunch and ending up in eternity. Is your Sunday “vibe” often aware of these realities?

Because every single day, eternity welcomes more surprise guests, but also, every single day, we continue loading Yaka with assurance that we will still be around to use it next week.

We hop on Boda Bodas, no matter the statistics. We still show up at the gym, even when our body shape may only exist to determine the size of our coffin.

We scroll when we should be sniffing tears a bit, sometimes. Of course crying is not nice, but crying has value.

Image/Fame of God studios/Unsplash

Last week’s funeral was supposed to reorient your convictions, but Monday’s meetings and errands buried all that; a month later, you are probably safely jogging on the same pavement where that ambulance parked, on somebody else’s most fateful night.

Meanwhile, the blue light flashes in your dark hair as you scroll past another “Mulago story” as if to “cool off” another busy at work.

Somehow, you recover after every funeral, just in time to binge on another Netflix series; you return from the burial quickly enough to continue “building the brand.”

Life’s distractions, top of which is often constant stimulation online, never let us face the world ‘as it is’—they keeps us in the world “as we want it to be’ which begs the question, who wins in the end, God or ourselves?

Those sights of skulls I saw in the hospital ward should have kept me teary and trembling about my mortality. A broken world requires people alive enough to grieve as they should.

But we move on, yet Jesus didn’t.

In Corinth, Apostle Paul described the resiliently hearty Christian as one who also lives with the knowledge that while they are inwardly renewed, they are also outwardly perishing. both true Christian realities.

Likewise, the writer of Ecclesiastes recommends that believers go to the house of mourning, more than the house of feasting.

After all, Jesus, in both Gathesmane and Lazarus’s graveside, showed us that tragedy is not an invitation to hide our heads in the sand of busyness, algorithms, and happy shiny Sunday faces.

But rather, an opportunity to cry well and deeply at how sin has wrecked our perfect world so that we may depend on him who’s the “resurrection and the life.” (John 11:25)