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I'm sure at some point in your life you've heard all the sayings about how people can't truly feel what joy is until they experience a certain amount of sorrow in their lives.

Those sayings.

Well... I think it works the other way around too. I mean, I believe a person can't really, truly know what sorrow is until they've experienced a certain amount of joy.

It's like this; until you've been swallowed by the depths of despair, or drowned in the pits of lonliness or sadness or loss, you won't have felt true happiness... true joy. At least, not to the same extent as someone who's been to those depths, and come back.

At the same time; until you stand atop the pillar of life, at the height of personal success - be that in a career or a love or a family - whatever it is in your life that makes you feel like you could conquer the world and all that might come along with it -- until you're that happy and something comes along and knocks you down, flipping you off that pedestal of joy and whirling you back to earth in a blazing crash of sorrowful misery, until then, you won't have known true sorrow either.

I think it's a process. I think that at certain points in our lives - all our lives, it is necessary for each and every single on of us to experience both. Joy and sorrow. And sometimes I think that during those back and forth, joy and sorrow experiences, one always has to be greater than the other - the joy or the sorrow - so that we always really feel it. Really get to the heart of it.

And in the end, if we don't experience both... then we probably haven't lived. Or if we have lived, we've lived too carefully. Too cautiously. And still then, that's not really living at all.

They say God doesn't give us more than we can handle. I believe that, even though it often feels like he throws an awful lot my way. And sometimes, if I'm being completely honest - which I am - I have struggled with my belief in a God who would take away someone I love. Or make a friend suffer endless amounts of horrible pain. Or let thousands of people die in natural disasters... or terrorist attacks.

I find myself questioning... if God doesn't give us more than we can handle, then why do all those people have to die?

But maybe God knows best. Better than any of us. Maybe those are the ones God knows couldn't handle it. And maybe those are the ones God takes... for their own comfort.

I certainly don't know.

What I do know though, is this; for every moment of great joy I've had in my life, I've also known great sorrow. And for every moment of great sorrow... I've been blessed with greater joy.

And I think it has to even out in the end.

A delicate balance.

It was after all, each of these sorrows and these joys that brought us to this place. To this little town in the Ukraine, just days away from having our daughter placed into our waiting arms forever.