This is Joy: Being Unable to Escape Experiencing God’s Goodness

I didn’t see this coming – a blog on joy. I can only remember having used the word “joy” once before in my writing because for too long, decades actually, the idea stirred pain in me. Like a barren woman dodges baby showers and church nurseries, I swore off allowing myself to contemplate joy.

Because I thought joy was an offshoot of happiness and happiness an offshoot of joy, I looked for them as some conjoined thing, like the snowballs that make up a snowman. After all, aren’t they comprised of the same substance and derived from the same source?

Because the two are so easily confused, we turn off our receptors for joy when our receptors for happiness return pain. Our mistaking them for the same receptors is what starves us of joy. My aim for this blog is to draw a distinguishable line between happiness and joy.

God scripted joy throughout the whole Bible, but I couldn’t relate to those parts, so I taped off the territory around joy where I would never be allowed to enter and pretended it wasn’t there.

I haven’t attended church regularly for six years. To be honest, it wasn’t the Mother’s Day and “love your spouse as your own body” sermons that drove me away. It was the music. One stanza expressing the joy of the Lord and I would be in tears. And I don’t mean discrete tears; I mean ugly crying – crying so hard I couldn’t pull myself out of it to hear the sermon and would have to leave.

There is no place where I am more self-aware than in church. Prior versions of me revive including old griefs and old images of what my life in church should look like as an adult, which I constructed while sitting in the pews of a church as a youth.

Church bombards me with old pain which doesn’t exist anywhere else anymore except in church. Praise music is supposed to direct energy, emotion, and thought to the One worthy of our concentrated attention, but my warped brain refuses to cooperate, and instead, forces me to attribute the painful flashbacks to the God being addressed in song.

I ran to God in solitude and have discovered joy there. I no longer search for it among physical, earthly encounters. As a matter of fact, I am convinced that joy cannot be experienced in the flesh. I don’t care if you marry your dream man, win the lottery, or become Miss Universe. That’s not joy, that’s happiness. And that is where I always looked for joy – in the realm where happiness resides.

In solitude, I disappear. Where I disappear, I experience joy.

In solitude, there is only one set of eyes – His looking on me – and His are the most loving eyes imaginable.

There is only one voice – His, which whispers as He reveals mysteries to me.

There is only one being – The Being – The Great I AM, who knows me fully and loves me to my depths.

He plays peek-a-boo with me as the sun darts in and out from between the clouds.

He sends His friends to visit me in the birds who gather at my birdfeeder.

He responds when I pray for simple tokens of His affection, like helping me make it to an appointment on time when I am running late by working all the traffic signals in my favor.

When I am insecure about the timing of a big decision or overwhelmed by responsibilities at work, I call to Him, and He gifts me with instincts which suggest the “right” thing to do at each turn. All goes well.

I am never alone, which again, I recognize by instinct – an instinct as constant as knowing that the power company is keeping the lights on in my home and the walls aren’t doing it.

He takes everything I bring to the table – loneliness, vulnerability, even tardiness – and removes all the detriment from those insufficiencies. He works everything together for good. His active presence around me, toward me, and within me is a steady influx of warmth, unconditional love, and cheer.

At His command, joy forces its way into my personal space. I am powerless against it. I can’t escape the condition of joy, because I can’t escape being loved and provided for by Him. I receive joy as I receive breath – instinctively and yet fully aware.

 

This is joy: being unable to escape experiencing God’s goodness.

 

By this new definition of joy, I sing joyful songs to the Lord free from pain. With eyes on Him, my feelings echo the sentiments of the psalms. I have taken down the barriers around the portions of the Bible which reference joy.

The defining line between joy and happiness is this: the two are conjoined, but not like the snowballs of a snowman, instead, like the halves of a ying yang symbol. Where you find more of one, you find less of the other, and vice versa. The louder happiness is the quieter joy is and the louder joy is the quieter happiness is. In truth, happiness matters very little when you are full of joy. The two are comprised of the same substance – praise – but derived from opposite sources. One is derived from self and the other from God.

If you feel deprived of joy, then you are seeking happiness that identifies as joy. You cannot be deprived of joy because there is no self-awareness at the root of joy. Joy is not something that can be attained by you for your benefit. It is only attributed to you from God so that you can authentically honor and praise Him. A sense of entitlement or deprivation only attaches to the want for happiness, whose aim is to benefit self. Joy’s only aim is to acknowledge God.

Happiness is seductive and thrives on our primal urge to survive. The pursuit of happiness is intuitive to human nature and is loud enough to completely silence joy.

The source of joy is God. When our focus on God grows, it automatically reduces self and selfish interests, which mutes the siren’s song of happiness.

This is how the very same hymn brings me hurt when sung in church but joy when I am alone in the car. In one setting, I am self-conscious. In the other, I have forgotten self.

I doubt we can be happy and joyful at the same time. When you are happy – or at least when you are aware of your happiness – you are self-aware.  When you are joy-full, your thoughts are so God-centered that He could ask you to sacrifice the thing that makes you most happy in life and you would forfeit it, grateful that you have something worthy of sacrifice. Joy is the sustaining power behind every martyr.

“Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” ~ Hebrews 12:2

Copyright © 2020 by D.M. Harrington

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash