How Joy Is Strength

How Joy is Strength

After a post a couple of weeks ago, I was asked by a friend how it is that joy is strength. It’s a good question – probably one with a number of entry points and no easy answer. The challenge comes in recognizing that joy is both source and expression – both foundation and outcome. Joy is sometimes mistaken for happiness. But it is not quite the same. Happiness tends to be circumstantial and consequential – icing on the cake of expectations met or exceeded – more caboose than locomotive. But joy is bigger than circumstance. Joy is fully aware of the circumstances, but doesn’t look to them for cues – it does its own thing, and thus reframes any circumstance as a place of encounter.

Joy is the fuel cell at the center of the soul – maybe at the center of the universe – which energizes and gives capacity for life as it is. Joy is able to enter in with the grit required for the trudging tedium of the everyday; to vibrate with a gentle, sustaining stillness underneath the deepest pain imaginable; to explode with mind-blowing wonder in a fireworks of celebration. No wonder Paul challenged us to rejoice – again and again!! He was not telling simply to be happy. It was, instead, his charge to re-fill with joy as often and as much as possible because joy fuels the graced life.

Joy is the means of transformation that resists being conformed to the world – or, for that matter, to any external pressure. It goes on, gently insisting on its own reality in which all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. There is an organ in fish which regulates the internal pressure to offset the crushing pressure from the outside such that at great depth, beset by hundreds of pounds of pressure per square inch, they can swim effortlessly and with beauty. Joy is like that. Life can be pretty crushing – the pressures can be overwhelming. Joy is what enables us to live calm, non-anxious lives – seemingly effortlessly and with great beauty.

To rejoice, then, is to deliberately sit in the long journey of Holy Week – to feel the calloused hands of Jesus wash our feet – to sit in the bleakness and shock of betrayal in the garden and the courtyard – to stand in the horror of Friday as life bleeds out into the thirsty ground – to be paralyzed by the fear, confusion, and isolation of a black Saturday – and to be jump-started into new-life wonder with Sunday’s resurrection dawning! Entry into each day is part of the discipline of rejoicing – each day has its parallels in our lives – each day carves out and creates space for the soul shaping reality of Resurrection Life. If God can raise the dead – and He can - let’s live like it! Regardless of our circumstance – lets live like it! Life is victorious over death! That awareness is what enables joy expressed in tear-stained laughter – to recognize that nothing fatal is ever final!! Even to grieve – with hope.

It was joy that enabled Jesus to endure the cross – and it is joy that will enable us for our life and death. No wonder He wants to give us His joy so that ours might be made full. He knows, probably better than anyone, that we are going to need it!