Cultivating Joy

Needless to say the past year of my life has brought so many ups and downs that I'm beginning to feel nauseous. This roller coaster is exhausting.

I always feel as if I have been residing in the downs more often than the ups. When I feel as if my season of walking through the valley is over, and I can see the light, I am met with another another valley.

I'm beginning to realize that this is just what life looks like. If I am to fear these valleys or let the anxiety, pain, and frustration of having to walk through them overtake me, then I have no hope for this life to be one full of beauty. What I am also beginning to see is that the more valleys I face, the easier they are to walk through. Once you have seen God walk you through one, you still know the next one is going to be equally if not more difficult, but you know that you're going to be okay.

Marty Caldwell (Global Director of Young Life) recently came to my current sweet home state of Arizona, and spoke at a leadership meeting that I attended. His words were utterly inspiring to me in my current state of inner turmoil. He spoke on cultivating gratefulness.

He painted a picture of a man he met overseas. This man barely had anything. Marty spoke of stepping into his small one room hut for a home, not much bigger than a bedroom on a home we would have here in the states. There was a window, a small table, and a lightbulb hanging by a string from the ceiling to light up the small space. Yet this man bubbled over with radiant joy. As he walked Marty through his small hut he envisioned all of the great things God was going to do in this hut. "And in this corner, I will stand and preach the gospel to the men! In this corner on this table will be water for the men to drink!" He was most literally so excited about the small amount that he had that he overflowed with joy. He was grateful for all that he had -- even though all he had were the shoes on his feet, and a small hut with a dirt floor.

Marty said with tears in his eyes,

"When we cultivate gratitude for all that God has given us, even though it may just be the breath in our lungs, we will live lives radiant of hope and joy. When you are grateful there is no choice but to be joyful."

What I have learned in this life is that entitlement is what breeds ungratefulness. When we believe we deserve something we do not have then we live lives that are angry, bitter, resentful, and lacking of joy. The harsh reality is that we don't deserve anything, and we owe everything. It is only by the grace of God that we have the very breath in our lungs. So we have everything to be grateful for.

Christian joy is a very foreign thing to our world, because it is not of this world. Joy is a fruit of the spirit, and it is a heavenly fruit. It is not normal to have hope in the wreckages of life. It is not normal when you have lost all things you love and care about, to have joy. It is not normal to have nothing, but be grateful for everything.

But that's the beauty of it all. A life with Christ is counterintuitive to what is 'normal'.

How is it then that we cultivate joy?

Something I heard from a very wise woman named Amy Sherman, was this: in order to be grateful, we have to rename our possessions as not 'ours' but as 'God's'. When we realize all that we possess, are actually God's possessions they stop ruling our lives as our gods, and God has the opportunity to be our God. When we finally put on these lenses to see that what we have is not truly by the work of our hands, but given by the grace of a good God, gratefulness begins to grow. When we put on an eternal lens that seeks first the Kingdom, and shy away from the blinders that trap us in our temporary situations, we are able to live lives of freedom and joy.

This is not to say that we will not experience a great deal of pain and suffering in our lifetime, or that our pain and suffering should be minimized. That is far from the truth, and pain will always demand to be felt. The realities of the broken world that we live in means that we will actually experience great deals of disappointment, pain, suffering, and brokenness throughout our lives. That is where I hope that all of you that are reading, have a place and a community where people will walk you through these seasons. We must also not forget that no matter how far God may feel that He is insanely near, and we are never alone in our trials and tribulations.

We live in a time where Jesus has come and saved us from our sin, sealing us for eternal life. He is a redeemer, and is more than capable of restoring our lives. However, we also live in a time where we eagerly await the complete restoration and perfection that is to come when Christ returns again. Therefore we live in a weird in-between of life where we feel the friction of wanting what is perfect, but it has not yet come.

We can root our hope here. That this is not forever. We still feel the pains and aches of brokenness, but this is not how the story ends. Our hope is not in the success and perfection of our current lives, but the life that is to come. That the earth again will be a place of harmony, unity, and peace -- just as God intended it to be when he created it, good.

When we root our hope in a beautiful eternity, and we grow the seeds of gratefulness to a God that is madly in love with us -- we begin the feel the restless bubbling of joy from the core of our being. It is a joy that never wavers, a joy that cannot be squelched by pain, a joy that is supernatural and unlike this world has seen. We cannot help but radiate joy when we find fulfillment in the God whose very breath he breathed into our lungs.