The Complexities of Joy

Recently while grocery shopping I deviated from my normal list and purchased chocolate pudding cups. I was immediately reminded of the following story:

Probably something like 20 years ago, teenager-ish aged me and my older sister were eating pudding cups in our family kitchen. I feel like it was late evening and winter break maybe, or around that time, and I’m pretty sure we had Christmas music playing. At any rate, there we were, standing in the kitchen, eating pudding cups and probably talking about Christmas break plans and I don’t remember how, but we started dancing around the kitchen with our pudding cups, singing along to the Christmas music. Not that I think anything I’ve written thus far would lead you to think this, but if you are imagining two graceful beauties, twirling around in expert ballet while wearing flowy white nightgowns, please kick that thought out of your brain immediately. We were as cool and graceful then as we are now, which is to say not at all. It was not a tender moment of shining Christmas lights and softly falling snow, fading out in blurry focus and reemerging on the following morning’s perfect family breakfast, tv movie style. No, we pranced about in full dork mode, and at one point one of us pretended to dip our spoon into the other’s pudding cup mid dance, and we both guffawed and laughed so hard we nearly peed our pants.

I texted this very important memory (with a lot more brevity than above) to my sister the other day. She of course remembered it, and shared that she had recently bought pudding cups for the first time in ages herself. Maybe God was giving us a message through pudding cups, she suggested. I agreed and said that obviously He was preparing me for the inevitable dentures to come, as I’d had a bit of a toothache at the time.

“Or maybe something about joy,” she responded plainly.

Maybe indeed.

I have a complicated relationship with Joy. Like many humans, I have had moments of exhilarating joy in my life. Like many Christians, my greatest moments of joy have been those ripe with the presence of the Holy Spirit, fresh on an intimate interaction with the One who loves me most, Jesus. Nothing on Earth quite compares to the loving presence of God- that stuff fills you up in every crevice with an ecstasy that’s otherworldly and everything else dims by comparison.

But, like every human, I’ve also had moments of deep sorrow, from the loss of a sibling to separation from loved ones and great disappointments that took me by surprise. Oh, how often life does not go as planned and feels lonely and sometimes empty and sends us searching. Jesus is there hoping your searching leads to Him (Matthew 11:28-30), and blessed are those for whom it does. I don’t know how people survive in this broken world without Jesus to cling to, and really, looking around, I see that they aren’t. People are barely hanging on.

And this brings me back to my complicated relationship with joy. With Jesus I have everything, and to live this temporary life with anything other than overflowing, grateful joy doesn’t make sense. The Bible tells us to “Rejoice Always!” (Philippians 4:4). People should see the shining light and love of Jesus pouring out of us like a breath of fresh air- a saving grace, a life preserver ready to be grasped by the desperate and broken.

But also, the more you know Jesus- the more I know Jesus, the more I know His heart, the more plainly I can see the brokenness of this world and the more I can see the pain other people carry and struggle under, and the more I care about the burdened and hurting. It’s easy to look around and sit in despair as things, honestly, seem to get worse and worse. And as promised in Revelations, they will continue to get worse and worse until Jesus comes again on his triumphant cloud of fire and rescues us all over again.

Oh, how often life does not go as planned and feels lonely and sometimes empty and sends us searching.

I know my fate. Sinner that I am, regardless of what I deserve, my story “ends” with eternity in perfect heaven with perfect Jesus, the One who loves me the most and the One I love the most in return. Talk about a happy ending- eternity in bliss with the lover of your soul (Revelations 21:1-4).

So again- why shouldn’t I be in perfect joy at all times? Not to say you can’t mourn or struggle- Jesus mourned, as we know, and I think it’s safe to say He struggled too (John 11:35, Luke 22:42-44). But in Him our joy may be complete, and it exists side by side with sometimes deep sadness.

I personally don’t struggle with that. You don’t have to be a Christian, I’d argue, to know that joy and sadness can exist simultaneously. You experience that at the funeral of a life well-lived, or when your child moves out of the family home and into the home of her new husband, etc. And certainly the Hope of Jesus makes pain bearable, and there underneath everything is Joy.

Where I struggle is somewhere else. I struggle in the generous outpouring of joy and blessing God gives me just because. Am I alone here? I doubt it. But I feel guilty grasping on to joy and things that make me just plain old happy. I honestly feel like to be a faithful follower of Christ and an effective witness, I should live in a damp stone prison and eat moldy bread and drink water and be in a constant state of suffering for my faith. I ignored my heart strings and looked away from beauty for huge parts of my life in favor of staring at the broken and ugly and serving until my fingers bled. And there is beauty in that too but here I sit in struggle.

Brief aside, I’m fully aware that the enemy is a thief of joy and one trick he may use is the burden of guilt (John 10:10), but I’m going to set that aside because not everything that makes us uncomfortable is the enemy, and feeling “happy” is not always the mark of Jesus. Anyway, I often feel, even in the midst of my struggle times, that God has made things too easy for me, blessed me too greatly, given me too much, especially when other people seem to have it so hard. Things click easily in my brain when other people just can’t get it, people yearn for parental affection when I feel like my parents are often giving me far too much attention, I don’t have cancer, my parents are still married to each other, I have a job I like that more or less pays the bills, I can look back and see where Jesus pursued me and ordered things for my good, over and over again. He’s not only provided for me but given me that plus, time and time again.

And man am I grateful, and man do I feel guilty. Yesterday I had a day off and I sat in my cozy, warm apartment and neglected chores and watched cheesy movies and felt loved by my Creator. Peace and Joy. But honestly who do I think I am?? People were struggling yesterday. They were worried about getting groceries to feed their kids. They lost their job. They struggled with addiction. They regretted mistakes in their marriage. And bigger than all of that, people walked about feeling fine but heading to hell. Comfortable, happy people who completely miss the point of what’s around them and don’t want to know Jesus because they think they are fine without Him, and I sat in my apartment with mocha and 90s movies, basking in Jesus loving me.

I walked away from full time ministry because I was worn out and tired and pouring out from empty and had been neglecting myself in favor of others since I was a kid. And I spent a year feeling really lost trying to figure out where God wanted me, and then I started thinking about where I wanted to be and got a little more lost and started feeling a lot more selfish. God in His infinite wisdom and grace did beautiful and hard things in this time. He stripped me down of the martyr identity I had given myself, stripped me down of the world’s expectations and the trying to find a “normal” life, and pulled things to the surface that He put in me before I was born that He calls good but I thought were useless. Grand and beautiful things that reflect His image and personality and put something good in the world for His Kingdom but weren’t hard enough and brought me Joy so I thought they couldn’t possibly be what God had for me, because somewhere in working hard at life and being the go-to helper and pouring over books of saints I learned a false lesson that serving God and following God meant only suffering.

Somewhere in working hard at life and being the go-to helper and pouring over books of saints, I learned a false lesson that serving God and following God meant only suffering.

Make no mistake, choosing to follow Jesus means choosing to pick up a cross, and I’ll address that more in my next post. And yet… God pours out. I’m trying to receive His blessing and His gifts with gratitude and love and pour that overflow out onto the lost and suffering without dragging a chain of guilt. True Christianity is both immense, eternal joy and often simultaneous suffering (John 16:33). I’m super grateful that God doesn’t have me living in a desert, cooking my meals over a steaming pile of dung. He’s asked that of some of His children (Ezekiel 4:12-15), and blessed are they that are trusted with His hard tasks. God loves them dearly. God also really loves David, who lived in a palace and had money and power and more than one foxy wife, things many men of the world would aspire to have and count as a source of joy. Even then, when David sinned and acted like a fool, God came to him and reminded David of all He’d given him, and then said, “I would have given you even more.”(2 Samuel 12:8) Essentially, “Son, did you not feel like you had enough? If you’d asked, I would have given to you. I’m not stingy.” God pours out. And yet the beautiful thing here is that all that David had wasn’t enough; his greatest moments of joy were those where he worked in concert with God, and focused on Him (Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Psalm 51:11-12).

So yes, life can be hard. And yes, life can be joyful. And it’s joyful for us sometimes when it is really hard for other people. And God routinely gives me things I don’t deserve for no reason other than to pour out His love. And sometimes He asks me to do really hard things, and sometimes He asks me to do things that are really fun and easy, and somehow those things bring Him glory still.

So I’m going to try and not feel guilty when God gives me unearned joy and peace and blessing above and beyond. I’m not going to live my life like I have to be miserable in order to feel like I’m living rightly. God delights in giving to His children, and when you commune together and have Joy, that is a beautiful, non-guilty thing (Matthew 7:11). Godly Joy doesn’t only exist in carrying a cross- sometimes it is dancing in the kitchen with pudding and a sister you love, and most of the time it is receiving Jesus however He wants to meet you, be it new lessons, sweeping worship, or yellow flowers along a dirt path.