Life hasn’t always gone as I had hoped it would. Despite the best laid plans (at least the ones that were within my capacity to imagine and create), life has on more occasions than I am able to count taken a sharp detour. As a child when this happens, it is somewhat easier to handle. Children know that no matter what they are hoping and planning ultimately their desires will have to align with those of their parent or they will simply not happen. Children are resilient. Children are typically more comfortable being dependent. Children are often better at trusting those in charge.
What happens to us in the bridge between childhood and adulthood? Why do we tend to lose that which we desire to keep? Is it all due to the circumstances we have come up against? Or is there more to it?
I am definitely not a specialist in the area of brain development. I am not a trained therapist. I am a Christ-follower who has questions – who is seeking for some solutions or answers to my questions.
It’s interesting to me that for the last decade and a half, I have been searching for answers to rekindling joy in my life. I am not talking about happiness. I know that happiness is circumstance based. It is fleeting. I’m not so concerned about happiness. It comes and goes for me just like it does for most. What I want is joy. Deep seeded excitement, passionate, soul satisfaction is what I am searching for. Joy is something that I have had, but for so long has seemed to be absent. Why has it gone? Why can I not seem to rekindle it? What am I missing? What am I doing wrong? I don’t believe that God desires to withhold His joy from His people, and I am His person – so where is the joy from my Father that is meant for me?
While I am not sure that I hold all the answers (in fact I am certain I don’t), I have been asking for a restoration of joy for years and this past few weeks I am hearing from the LORD about it. I miss joy, because I have tasted it. I have had joy for a time. After all this time, God opened up a thought to me about joy through an old devotional book with bindings that are currently only binding a portion of the pages anymore. It was a book that had belonged to my Gram.
What I want you to know, is that my Gram was one of the most influential people in my life. I was blessed to have my Gram on this earth and living in close proximity to me for about three and a half decades. Gram was one of those people who didn’t have much in the way of material things and earthly wealth, but she was dialed into Jesus. She knew her Savior. Not text-book knowledge (although she certainly had that), but a deep-rooted relationship with her LORD. Gram sought God constantly, not only for her needs, but the needs of others. Gram not only spoke to God, but God spoke to and through her – she was a woman of wise counsel.
Imagine then, my shock when I saw the familiar red pencil marks in her devotional book underlining a passage on joy. Strangely, I had read this before, but this was the time that it stuck out to me. This is the time that it connected with me. It appears that joy at times eluded my dear Gram – God’s obedient and loved one, too! Here is what was written: “In all true discipline, and in the true spiritual development of each disciple, there is first a wonder and the joy of first acquaintance, then comes the long plain stretch of lesson – learning and discipline, when joy seems so much a thing of the past as never to be recaptured again… Joy is of two kinds. The joy born of love and wonder, and the joy born of love and knowledge, and between the experience of the two joys lie discipline, disappointment, almost disillusion. But combat these in My Strength, or rather cling blindly, helplessly to Me and let Me combat them, persevere in obeying My will, accept My discipline, and the second Joy will follow.” – A.J. Russell God Calling
Mind blown. Of course the joy of my youth now eludes me. It was the kind of joy born of love and wonder! It is that joy of newness in my faith, newness in relationship, much as there is a joy combined with new love that seems to fade in our earthly relationships with one another. It isn’t that we are no longer loving or “in love,” but rather that the emotion and feeling of that love begins to shift into something much deeper. It is the commitment tied to it, along with the experiences and challenges that it has overcome that add layers of depth.
Friend, I kid you not, I have found such comfort in knowing that even if Joy seems to elude me in my current situation or circumstance: 1) I am not alone. Even my spiritual mentor has struggled with that; 2) God is not withholding joy from me – He will provide it! He is working on refining me to experience it in a completely different and more meaningful – and sustaining way; 3) I will receive it. My part is easy. I need only to cling blindly to my Father who is bringing me toward it with every breath I breathe.
Even as I write this my heart is stirred with such wonder. My God is so good, and so caring. My God is so willing to speak to us even when we find ourselves questioning His actions – or what we believe to be inaction. He isn’t mad at me for not having more of it – He sees what is on the horizon for me and I think it excites Him! I think He knows that when the Second Joy comes my heart will soar. And it is coming. This refining serves His purpose.
Ah, friend, I am not sure where you find yourself on the “joy meter,” but God’s using our greatest hurts, our disappointments, our struggles to reveal it. They hurt. They feel like they knock our knees out from under us, but God’s people will not fall. We are left standing in His strength. We are clinging blindly to the One who has a constant and loving grip on us. What a gift we have indeed been given on this journey!
Blessings!