PART TWO:
Problems
To Enjoy
or
There's Joy In This
Have you ever committed to something with God, and then a
test came right away? Like, you decide
to be more patient and end up in the longest checkout line you’ve ever known? Here’s my latest version of this funny
testing that life brings.
Pure joy, it
says. Last month, I started meditating
on James 1:2. We’re meant to consider it
pure joy when we encounter all kinds of trials.
Being peaceful or hopeful? That
makes sense. I can usually do
those. But pure joy evokes this picture
of wild glee - running barefoot on the ocean shore, holding your newborn baby,
eating really good ice cream – stuff like that.
Maybe I could get all the way to seeing my problems as
joyful (because of all the good God does through trials, as the verse later
explains), but it names the joy as pure.
As in, no room for my usual leave-me-alone-because-this-is-hard
funk.
So I got curious.
I decided that when something tough happened, I’d tell myself, “There’s
joy in this,” and see what happened. I
soon had lots of opportunities to test and learn this verse.
One night, my hair felt waxy. I looked up a DIY hair-softening treatment on
Pinterest. This is perfect! I have a ripe banana and some yogurt! Let’s do this. Well, if I was cool enough to be on Twitter,
I could have joined the #PinterestFail club.
I ended up with a tangled, stinky nest of banana chunks that wouldn’t
wash out. Something about the combo of
ingredients actually made my hair smell like puke. Pity tears sprung up as my husband slowly
combed and rinsed my silly mistake in the kitchen sink. “This is it.
This is my trial,” I thought. “There’s
joy in this.”
The joy was in
bonding with Jeff. He’s never combed my
hair before and his gentle detangling was love to my dented pride. We laughed over the terrible smell and the
irony of this so-called beauty treatment.
The very next night, with my hair still giving off a
subtle banana vomit essence, I decided to make popcorn on the stove while Jeff
put our son Luke in his pajamas. I was
also doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher, and watching a YouTube video on my
phone. Multi-tasking and popcorn aren’t
buddies. I really, really burned
it. I opened all the windows to air out
the house. “Grrrrrr….so stupid!!....I
mean, there’s joy in this.”
This time, the joy was that the situation forced me to
follow my commitment to not snack after dinner.
You can’t snack on it if you’ve burnt it to ashes!
A bigger test came in the form of my archenemy: traffic.
I was driving home from Seattle and there was a lane closure. Rain, semi trucks, and then Luke woke up from
his nap. I had been trying this verse
for long enough that I quickly switched to joy mode. However, the traffic/crying little boy combo
was making me so irritable. My joy list
was forced and monotone: “Thank you,
God, that we have enough gas in the car.
Thank you, God, that Luke and I are safe. Thank you, God, for the green trees. Bueller…Bueller…”
Then, real, PURE joy arrived! The most honest joy I’d yet had in this experiment. My sweet Luke is very good with farm animal noises. Out of the blue, he stopped crying and started quacking. Was there a duck out the window? Not that I saw, but who cares? He quacked loudly, happily, proudly, even - - and it was a very joyful moment in our trial. We laughed and quacked along that slow, wet stretch of road.
Then, real, PURE joy arrived! The most honest joy I’d yet had in this experiment. My sweet Luke is very good with farm animal noises. Out of the blue, he stopped crying and started quacking. Was there a duck out the window? Not that I saw, but who cares? He quacked loudly, happily, proudly, even - - and it was a very joyful moment in our trial. We laughed and quacked along that slow, wet stretch of road.
Learning this verse turned out to be more than looking
for joy in my problems. It became a decision
that there IS joy everywhere. Pure joy
can’t be faked. Even when I’m not feeling joy, I can live joy. Sometimes I just have to walk down the
obligatory joy path for a little bit until the pure stuff takes over.
My examples are silly, everyday ones, and that’s
intentional. These little, daily mishaps
and annoyances can be cracks in our hearts, draining small drops of joy that we’re
meant to keep. Maybe we don’t lose a lot
each time, but it adds up. I want a life
of pure joy. Even as I write this, I’m afraid that maybe I’m
getting too joy-confident and a problem will knock me down hard this
afternoon. I have to cling to my Author
of joy and say, “God, whatever comes, I know you are with me.” That truth itself is pure joy.
