I woke up with this peculiar kind of sadness today.

Not the kind of sadness that makes me want to cry or stay in bed or eat an entire tub of ice cream.

It was more like the kind of sadness that just quietly lingers – a sadness that sits on your shoulders and keeps poking you in the back of the head, just in case you forget that it’s there. It’s the kind that offers itself as an apology, and we always forgive it, even though “sorry” doesn’t exactly cut it.

I was sad because the first thing I read on Facebook when I woke up was that our world is cruel, and that there’s nothing we can do about it.

To be fair, I do think the world can be cruel sometimes. I think too often we show others that they’re not enough. We say ugly things and we hold their hearts carelessly. We tell them that their minds are too messy, their dreams are too strange, and their hearts are too dented. We dance around a mighty big universe, but sometimes, we still find something wrong with the voices inside of it. Yes, sometimes we are cruel. Sometimes, we make the world cruel.

But you wanna know what’s funny?

I don’t really think cruelty is human nature.

It’s times like these that remind me what we were all made for – what it really means to be a human on this mighty universe we get to call home. We were made for pulling people out of boxes, not putting them in. We were made to have a charming boldness and to forfeit our insecurities. We were made to have restlessly seeking hearts, and we were made so that God could look at all those cruel little messes we’ve made and still see us with sparkling eyes. We were made so that the big things could make us giddy and the little things could leave us pleasantly surprised.

That’s human nature.

Let life in. Once you do, the little things just might pleasantly surprise you.

1. The sound that acoustic guitars make.

2. Hedgehogs.

3. Time actually does heal.

4. Getting up to checkout and realizing that something you bought was unexpectedly on sale.

5. Having a place to call home.

6. Sunshine.

7. Everything dances a little bit when the wind blows.

8. Tomorrow always comes.

9. People admire things about you that you don’t even know about.

10. Music from your childhood.

11. Others rarely notice the things you nitpick about yourself.

12. Warm drinks on cold days.

13. Spontaneously thinking of something that makes you happy and not being able to stop smiling.

14. Pinky promises.

15. Rivers look pretty in every season.

16. The smell of food when you’re hungry.

17. Band-aids.

18. There are significantly less robbers in the world than I thought there were as a kid.

19. Your mistakes.

20. God still shows up in every last one of our huge messes.

21. Sunday mornings.

22. There is something good in everyone.

23. Your handwriting doesn’t look like anyone else’s.

24. Things that keep you on your toes.

25. Doodles in notebooks.

Cruelty doesn’t have to be human nature if we don’t let it. I don’t think life wants us to sit around being sad that people are cruel or only waiting for the big things to surprise us. If it did, it wouldn’t hand us all the marvelous little things. Let human nature surprise you. Let life in.