12. Sorrowscape

This Portmanteau of the Week will restore your hope in life.

Dec 15, 2023

Thank you again, patrons, for your support. Here is the newest addition to your ever-blossoming vocabularies, and a stream-of-consciousness diary from me. No paywall this time around because I want to tell you a story, a story I hope eventually to tell in full with the permission of those concerned.

A man came to our house for dinner tonight. Though I had noticed he walked with a limp, my main impression of him was an unusual warmth. Each time I saw him, his face would light up with a slow smile that grew to suffuse his entire face, brightening his eyes over the ledges of his high, wide cheekbones with a kind of gentleness I rarely observe in men of his age. He is always eager to tell my husband how he is working to fight corruption in African governments, passionate about his subject, yet also (like many academics) self-conscious. Like he’s worried he’s boring you, that you’re just nodding along out of politeness.

The freshness of his spirit set him apart immediately from the stale, closed-off demeanor of most people I meet at church (no offense, but most people are preoccupied with themselves, and it shows). I wondered who he was.

Okay, I knew who he was. But only by his nametag-level description and by a radiance in his face. I wanted to know where the radiance came from.

Now, I know he’s an angel.

Fifteen years ago, this man was a successful economist with a job offer at Columbia University and a large, happy family. Then, one day, he went on a trip to his hometown and never returned. His American house was foreclosed on and sold to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, he was lying wrapped up in a sheet in a morgue in Kenya, presumed dead when his eyes blinked open.

There was shouting, and he felt himself being jolted on a gurney over to the ER. He had been in a terrible car accident. His wife was dead and his limbs were broken like cheap pencils, the bones snapped clean through. Even after he revived from apparent death, the doctors had no hope he would live. And indeed, he would end up in the morgue another time before the ordeal was through. But he had to live. His four children were still alive, and now that their mother had left, he was not going to leave them alone. So, he pulled through.

As he told his story, I realized that his warm smile concealed constant physical pain due to the lingering effects of his injuries—rods in his limbs and wires holding his shattered foot together. After coming back twice from the gate of death, he returned to his house to find it occupied by another. On top of his pain and grief, he is still fighting the foreclosure of his house, which left him without a place to live. After he lost everything, people he counted as friends stared right through him and hurried past him on the street.

Yet, he laughs. He smiles. He tells his story, and he tells us to be grateful for what we have because he was arrogant in his success, and God humbled him.

“You can be happy one moment,” he said. “And then in the next, it is all taken away from you. All gone.”

At the end of the meal, he declared that he would bless our table, and in the firm authority of his voice, I heard an echo of the powerful man he once had been.

“Jehovah,” he began, and he spoke a blessing in Hebrew over our house before praying that God meet all our needs and preserve our peace.

Then he looked down at his foot, that smile spreading across his face. Our baby had crawled up to him and untied his shoe.

“Jesus washed his friends’ feet,” he said. “And he said that we must all be like little children to enter the kingdom of God.”

He chuckled.

“This girl is special, I think. She may be a prophetess. She will be a great evangelist, and she will sing with a powerful voice.”

He is an angel, so I believe him. And I hope, in good time, after many more dinners, he will become a close advisor and friend. There is nobody I would rather learn from than someone like him.

His sorrowscape is the vastest I have ever glimpsed. It stretches from sea to sea, from the emotional agony of losing the wife and mother of his children to the physical agony of watching an under-resourced African doctor drill a hole through his leg without anesthesia. He walks this path God’s set for him with a limp. But he walks it with a smile because, through it all, God is his life and his light. He has been purified by fire to an extent that most of us never will experience in this life. Like Jesus, he is a “man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief.” That is why I call him an angel.

Prompt: Who in your life has the largest sorrowscape? How can you encourage them? How can you learn from them?