When my wife Elisabeth and I learned we were expecting our fifth child, I did not feel blessed. We thought our family was complete. We had a plan, a future we could see clearly. And then, disruption. I mourned the loss of the life we had mapped out. I was poor in spirit and afraid. I had lost control.

If I am being honest, I have always preferred the second half of the Beatitudes. Of course, the sermon recognizes the peacemakers, the merciful, the clean of heart. Those are the ones I want to claim. But Jesus doesn’t start there. He starts with the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and the meek. He starts with the feelings I spend most of my life trying to avoid.

Ten years into recovery from alcoholism, I’ve come to understand that my feelings about circumstances aren’t facts about those circumstances. The news of our fifth child, as joyful as any new life should be, was quite simply just new information. My thinking made it a crisis. Father Richard Rohr might call this kind of situation falling upward, the idea that what looks like descent is often the beginning of real growth. The Beatitudes seem to say the same thing: that discomfort may not be an obstacle to grace, but the very door through which grace enters.

Our youngest daughter turned two this spring. She is joy incarnate, the loudest laugh in a house that was already loud with four kids. She was the Beatitude I didn’t want to live, and the blessing I couldn’t have imagined. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” I used to read that as a promise for someday. Now I read it as permission for today. Permission to feel what I feel, and to trust that God is already at work in it.