It is April 15: It can be a good day.

Today your taxes are due. Yesterday in 1865 Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Last night in 1912 the good ship RMS Titanic sank with hundreds of souls. What do you do the day after a bad day? Most of us have them, but what comes next?

The day after a very bad day is hard, but it can also be the start of better times. Generally, I have found that the greatest sorrow comes later, the mourning doesn’t hit that first morning, and a peaceful shock is the immediate result. They say that this was true on the Carpathia for the survivors of Titanic, a far worse disaster than I have ever faced.

Some survivors did well and some did badly. Here is what the Bible and their experience have taught me about making it through tough times.

Look beyond.

Ignore people who tell you it is not so bad. These prophets of cheer tell you that if you broke one leg, you might have broken two. This is true, but useless. The broken leg hurts.

Instead, I have come to accept bad news. It is. People let us down or providence is not what we had hoped. This hurts. Let it.

Don’t cheer up, but do look beyond. I have discovered that crying hurts nothing, but sinning, as a result of my misery, makes things worse. When depressed the temptation is to self-medicate and we all have different vices: food, drink, drugs, porn, self-harm. Some of our vices can become addictions and then we need serious help.

However, I have found that when I look “beyond,” the pain does not go away, but hope returns. If we die on Titanic, then we face God. If we live, we face God, but with a chance to find the grace we will need when we come to that last test.

Less dramatically, if you have failed, look to the time, next Christmas perhaps, when the failure will still be real, but hopes will also begin to become real. Look to God. He is beyond the past and He can heal the past by providing hope for today that becomes real tomorrow.

Trite but true.

Accept the “feels.” 

Don’t try to cheer up. Sorrow is real and those emotions must be allowed to wash over the soul and we must register them.

A wise pastor taught me to treat my feelings like the weather: register them, feel them, but don’t think I must act on them. I am sad, now what should I do? The two things do not have to connect. My sorrow might cause me to wallow in a video game hoping the passage of time will solve my problems. My mind and spirited nature can accept my sorrow, but I must go do my duty to prepare for the day when my sorrow will give way to victory.

Never move on, but keep growing. 

You cannot leave behind a traumatic experience such as a divorce or job loss or death in the family. I don’t want to leave the relatives and friends who have died in the past. They are with me every day. The sorrow is there, in a sense, but so is growth. We accept that we are scarred and then we remember that so is Jesus. When we see Him in Paradise, His hands will be scarred, but the scars will be beautiful.

At least they will be made beautiful: the crucifixion will always be ugly, the pain always real. God made a triumph out of this pain, but without wishing away the pain or the scars. He carries in His Body the sorrow, the shame, and makes both, in a way, beautiful. The simultaneous perpetual ugliness and beauty of the nail scarred hands is the deepest truth that the depressive and the overly optimistic miss. A cross is ugly forever, but sweet is the iron and sacred is the wood where Jesus died so we could live.

The brave men and women of Titanic redeemed chaos and ugliness by being brave. When a brave man dressed up to face death as a gentleman, he did not make death less ugly, but he made it simultaneously beautiful. We can take our pain and the evils done to us, acknowledge the evil which will always be evil, and then make a new meaning of virtue, courage, and hope from those events.

Walter Lord, the author of the seminal A Night to Remember, reported that in later life the over sixty survivors who chatted with him had gained a calm from their experience. They had seen Titanic and so nothing was quite as bad. Of course, this was not true of everyone. One young child died in a car accident. Another man died in Hitler’s camp. Nobody ends a winner: every man, woman, and child on RMS Titanic is dead now. But every man, woman, and child who refused to surrender to evil, who sought grace, and lived by faith . .. who remembered the courage as well as the cries of the dying . . .made something that had been simply a tragedy into something more complex: a tragedy and a divine comedy. They see God now and God is in the business of turning mere scars into the birth marks for a severe beauty, a divine mercy.