Sorrow prepares you for joy It violently…

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

-Rumi

“It was too perfect to last ‘ so…

“It was too perfect to last,’ so I am tempted to say of our marriage.

But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic – as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it (‘None of that here!’). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation.

But it could also mean ‘This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore, of course, it would not be prolonged.’ As if God said, ‘Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.”

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed