Where is Joy?

Rejoice!

Where is Waldo? A puzzle book where a figure always dressed in a striped red hat and shirt. Mostly he is hiding behind things, camouflaged, among dozens of other figures doing certain tasks. Sometimes you stumble onto Waldo by sheer luck.

Is joy like that? Hard to find? Or hiding in plain sight?

We humans are cranky (haven’t you been cranky in the last couple of months?). We get easily upset. And we are susceptible to losing things. Even children.

A woman had a baby in her later years. A friend called to find out how the baby was doing. She responded: “I don’t know! I’m waiting for the baby to cry to remember where I laid him last!” I know, bad joke. But I’m joyous today. Sometimes we need a nudge to remember joy is a fruit given to us by the Holy Spirit like a child is a fruit of the womb.

Humans (believers and unbelievers) are susceptible to losing joy. But also regaining it. God restores it simply for the asking: “Restore the joy of your salvation to me” (Psalm 51:12). How about it? If joy is in short supply today, abundance is in the ask, seek and knock. 

We lose joy when we trot out how religious we are! Pharisee-like! Every time! We also lose our joy when we use religious duty to control sin. Joy flees for lack of surrender to God’s love with heart, soul, mind, and body.

How do you notice you lose your joy? When things don’t go your way? When your freedom is curtailed? Lose control, as we have for the last couple of months? We lose joy when no one cares enough to call and check in. Do a little soul searching about it. Then fight back for joy asking God to restore it!

We are made for joy because we are made in the image of God! That’s right! I long for the “fullness of joy” in God’s presence said the Psalmist in 16:11. Joy in God’s presence! How do you experience God’s presence? For me it happens in praise songs, in prayer, in remembering what God has done in my life. When I consider what I was, where I’ve been and how far I’ve come. I find joy when I discover how delighted God is with me, his beloved child. He sees me and He smiles playfully winking at his Son and Holy Spirit.

I wonder if part of the problem of constant in and out of joy rests in a faulty view of God.

Perhaps we Christians unwittingly view God as a kind of cosmic killjoy or a “spy-in-the-sky.” Or maybe we just think he is distant and uninterested.

Central to the Gospel is a fresh re-visioning that God is reigning in this world. And God is the most joyful being in the cosmos! I mean look around you! Holding a newborn. Couples kiss and make up. Infinite colors, landscapes, bejeweled stars, lakes and rivers and oceans teaming with life. And so many planets, universes, black holes. We can only live on one!

I wonder if Father stayed up late each night just watching his Son sleeping? God experiences joys more fully than we do! That level of joy awaits our timeless discovery. God leads a very interesting life contrary to what some think. He is a happy being. And he shares. He is never not joyous.

As C. S. Lewis eloquently puts it in the Problem of Pain, “God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness there is, not the happiness that is not.”

Let’s let Brother Lawrence have the last practical steps into joy: I have abandoned all particular forms of devotion, all prayer techniques. My only prayer practice is attention. I carry on a habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming joy.

And this: We should fix ourselves firmly in the presence of God by conversing all the time with Him...we should feed our soul with a lofty conception of God and from that derive great joy in being his. We should put life in our faith. We should give ourselves utterly to God in pure abandonment, in temporal and spiritual matters alike, and find contentment in the doing of His will, whether he takes us through sufferings or consolations.