I have a cousin who was born with a severe mental handicap and has been institutionalized since infancy. At the end of June, my cousin—let’s call him Toby—turned fifty. I don’t think any physician who examined him expected him to live to ten let alone all these years. Every day of his life has been, in that sense, a miracle.

I remember going to visit Toby sometimes on Sunday when we were both little boys. My parents and younger brother and I, along with Toby’s parents and Toby’s younger brother, and our grandparents, would take the long drive to the home in rural Louisiana where Toby lived. Those long-ago Sundays formed much of the foundation for how I would come to see the world.

Toby is unable to speak. He expresses himself with snorts and nasal sounds interspersed with claps and other gestures. We would meet him inside the big building where he lived with what must have been a couple of dozen other patients. Toby and a few of the rest of us who had made the trip to see him would get into my grandfather’s roomy Ford LTD and drive around the big, piney campus of the group home. Toby would sit in the passenger seat and pull at the visor above his head, occasionally snorting with excitement as we passed a playground or a swing. Toby’s world, as far as I was ever able to tell, was overflowing with joy. I have never, in my entire life, encountered anyone who appeared to be happier than he was.

But for me that joy was a catalyst for a sadness that would penetrate deeper than I could have imagined.

Sometimes we would stop at one of the playgrounds or swings we passed and get out. The swings were made of flat, polygonal sheets of steel with bars and chains going around the outside, the entire thing suspended from a frame by lengths of half-rusting chain. Wheelchair swings. Toby loved to sit with us other kids as one of our parents pushed the swing to and fro. Pity welled up in me for Toby and anyone who had to live in a world with wheelchair swings. Then with pity came shame, for who was I to pity anyone, and what did I know about Toby’s world? He was almost constantly in good spirits. And the priest our grandmother once asked about Toby had said that, when the time came, Toby would go directly to Heaven. But what was there to envy in the meantime, a voice inside me whispered. And what was this world anyway, where suffering and bliss lay side by side?

When the time came for us to leave, we would return to the entrance of Toby’s group home. The black ladies who worked there, angelic women with worn faces, would help us see him inside. Toby would cry out. The visit was over. The special moment had passed. He returned to a world that haunted me in my boyhood and does still, all these decades later. Some of the residents in Toby’s ward were confined to wheelchairs and had to wear helmets constantly, as they were always tapping their heads against the painted cinderblock walls. There was a television on in a corner of the big central hall, and the ladies had done things up as cheerfully as one could. There were big windows through which poured the sad, pine-filtered afternoon light that I have only ever found in southern Louisiana. There was supper being fixed in the kitchen at the back. There was, amid the disfigured bodies and gaping-jawed faces, some semblance of a human existence. But then there was the cringing in the heart at the sight of Toby and his companions, the overwhelming sadness and futility one felt at knowing that this was how some among us passed their earthly days. Did one give thanks to God for life, or demand of Him answers for lives that did not fit any discernible calculation of happiness?

Over the past few years, and in many, many ways, I have seen suffering and had my share of it too. I have been angry with God. What kind of a stupid world is this, shot through with useless pain? I have held pain against God and hated Him for giving me no formula for understanding what any of it might mean.

But now I think I can see a glimmer of reconciliation. At the end of June came a message: Toby, who had been suffering from cancer, has been cleared by the doctors. He is OK. He is alive and halfway to being a hundred years old. What his life means is known only to the God who made him. The same goes for me and everyone else.  We are given life and must live. Toby’s world, from which I once recoiled in horror, is our world too. We must give thanks for pain and sadness, for these, like Toby’s almost limitless joy, are both the price and the privilege of the life that God has given to all of us.