Desperately Seeking Joy

When I was in college, I had an acquaintance that used to jump over coffee tables.  A fellow member of a campus ministry team, this young man said that he leaped over pieces of furniture because he was filled with the joy of the Lord and of His salvation.

He bugged the living daylights out of me.

I knew another young woman, blond and perky, who was a participant in the first-ever backpacking trip I attempted.  Each morning she would awake, blond and perky and say (in her blond and perky voice), “Isn’t it a beautiful day?  The birds are singing!  The brook is babbling!”

I crawled out of my sleeping bag and attempted to rub feeling into my tired, blistered feet, toes numbed by days of hiking in boots-too-small, and overheard a friend pull this dear young woman aside and say,

You might want to rein in some of that perkiness first thing in the morning, around Nancy.  She’s large and scary and might actually hold your head under said babbling brook if you don’t knock it off.

Or something to that effect.

Joy, it seems, comes more easily to some of us than others.  Some of us are bouncy, pouncy Tiggers, while the rest of us seem to be eternally pessimistic Eeyores.  And I’ve never been very good at manufacturing joy that I don’t feel.  No matter how sound my theology is, or how well I grasp the reality of my redemption and identity in Christ, furniture leaping just isn’t in me.  I can’t will myself to feel joy.

A couple of years ago, before my daughter started her freshman year at college, my husband, son and I attended an orientation session designed for families of college-bound students.  There would be a change in our family dynamics, we were told.  Yes, we nodded.  Of course there would be, we agreed.

Little did I know the changes in store for us, and for me.  My daughter’s leaving happened to coincide perfectly with the height of my son’s battle to shed the dragon skin of adolescence.  With a healthy dose of middle-age hormones thrown in on my part, my happy Christian home was launched into a perfect storm of the complete opposite of joy.  I spent the better part of two years lying in bed awake at night and lying on the sofa crying during the day.

It’s a good thing I didn’t run into any perky blonds.

A friend, a spiritual director by vocation, came by and spent time with me.  I didn't really know what a spiritual director did.  My friend sat with me, prayed with me, bathed me in scripture, and handed me tissues.  She handed me a lot of tissues.  She asked me what it was that I wanted from God.

“Peace and joy,” I said.

Often, my friend read the same scripture to me over and over again.  She read,

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control…Galatians 5:23.

I knew, I told her.  I knew those things were supposed to be present in the life of a faithful Christian.  But they were missing in mine, and I didn’t know how to get them.  I couldn’t manufacture them; I couldn’t will them to appear.  I didn’t know what to do.

She read me those same words, over and over again:

…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace…

It took me forever, it seemed, to get what she—what God was trying to get me to see and understand:

Joy and peace are fruits of the Spirit.  They are God’s work, not mine.

The same Holy Spirit who first breathed life into me, giving me the ability to believe, is the One who continues to work in me.  He is the One who changes me and gives me both the desire and ability to shed my own dragon skin.  He is the One who shows me when joy and peace are missing in my life and then brings me to the point where I know I need to ask for them.  And when I am brought to the point of recognizing that I can’t possibly manufacture these things on my own, He breathes them back into my life as gift.

And I don’t even have to jump over any furniture.

Joining Faith Barista at her Thursday Jam, answering the question, Is Joy Easy or Hard For You?

And with emily who welcomes us all, even those of us with dragon skin: