This month, millions of people around the world are missing their second birthday celebration in a row, including both my mother, whose birthday is in mid-March, and my wife, whose birthday is on the thirty-first. In fact, one of the last things that Alice and Murray and I did with other people last March before everything shut down was to go to a birthday celebration for our elementary-school-aged neighbor down the hall. Later in March, people didn’t feel much like celebrating, but we still tried to celebrate birthdays in our small ways. It was hard, though, to have a celebration, a real party where we could see the people we loved outside our own little family units.

Last Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, was a day that the church sometimes calls “Laetare Sunday.” It comes from an old Latin introit, part of the liturgy for that days; it means, “Rejoice!” It’s a day of rejoicing in the midst of Lent, when some of the rigor of the season is relaxed. Even the purple on the altar will sometimes be changed out for pink or rose, as a sign of joy. It’s the same thing that we do in Advent, on the third Sunday, which is why there’s a pink candle in your Advent wreath. It’s a moment of joy in a penitential, somber season.

There’s a lesson for me in that, about all of life. We recognize that even in the midst of sorrow, there’s always joy; and in the midst of joy, there’s always sorrow. On any given day in any normal time of life, I may be feeling joy, I may be feeling happiness; but there’s inevitably someone else who’s suffering grief or loss. The same goes the other way around: I may be feeling sadness or frustration, and someone else is feeling relief or contentment.

It’s important for us as human beings to recognize that we don’t always experience the same things at the same time, and while many of us have been united emotionally by our experience of this pandemic, it’s become clearer over time that we’ve also been divided—not just politically, but emotionally. We’ve experienced different parts of this time in different ways over time, depending on our own circumstances and personalities.

But there’s another lesson, too, which is the importance of rejoicing, even in a serious time, the importance of celebrating those small moments even when things are hard. The lesson of a tragedy like this pandemic is not that we shouldn’t rejoice—it’s that we should! We should appreciate those moments, we should celebrate those birthdays. Not in an unsafe way, but with real and genuine joy. We should recognize and mark those things that are important to us, because even if the world is hard, even if the world is full of sorrow and struggle, it is also full of joy. They don’t cancel each other out. You can’t do the math and add the up to a positive or negative number. They just exist there, alongside each other, always.

So rejoice in your joy. And weep in your sadness. And know that they’re always there together.