It Begins With Joy

I found myself thinking about Joy this morning. Christians and non-Christians alike, I think it’s a feeling or even a state of mind we’ve all experienced. For me, Joy seems to be the most similar to freedom. It’s a feeling of release almost. Happiness uninhibited.

The image that most often comes to mind is being out in a field with flowers all around and the wind blowing and trees swaying. Surrounded by rustling sounds of leaves and chirping birds and floral smells and a feeling of being all at once united and still distinct in your surroundings. I picture my arms outstretched to feel it all pass through me.

Its such a deep and pure and Joyful feeling. The goodness of it is the same goodness I experience in prayer. In church. In my desire to know Jesus personally.

Christianity, true Christianity, is Joy.

Many of you who are not religious may think I’m crazy. After all, christianity is rules and hypocrisy and judgement and insanity.

Or if it is something good, it is just a bandaid to make people feel better.

I used to fear the same thing. Maybe faith is just something to make me feel better because the alternative is so bleak. I used to stare down the path of nothingness and look at my life. All my hopes and dreams in a vacuum of me and not much else. Sure there was the hope of my own happiness but to what end? Why search for meaning in my own life or create my own meaning when that was it. Me in a sea of randomness. My entire identity and consciousness just a bi product of humans evolving in extraordinary ways.

Still…that nagging Joyful feeling would come. As I searched for answers for whether or not God existed, I seemed to come into contact with this Joy more and more. Sometimes it was as simple as sitting outside at starbucks in the mornings, drinking a warm latte, and watching the clouds go by. The sky looked different to me. Almost like I was seeing it in a clearer way. The breeze felt pure and full of possibility. I don’t know how else to describe this feeling to you. Hopefully, you’ve felt it at least once yourself and can relate.

This was about as far as I got in my intellectual quest. Moments of this fleeting Joy followed by a quick descent back to the fear and dread that it was merely my mind searching for hope. No matter how I tried I didn’t understand faith. I didn’t know what it was. How could I believe when I didn’t? How could I be sure of a God when I was not sure at all? My feelings of Joy and certainty were only brief.

Months passed and this state of mind seemed to persist. Sometimes I would go to church. Sometimes I wouldn’t.

Sometimes I believed in God. Sometimes I didn’t.

Then my best friend died.

I can tell you with honesty that this was the darkest, most painful, and LEAST joyful time in my life. It happened at the worst time possible too because I was taking an overload of 21 hours and trying to graduate and working on top of it.

I almost dropped out of school. Every single fiber of me wanted to. Grief floods you. That’s the only way I can describe it. It takes over everything, darkens everything.

I prayed one night. I remember it was a half-hearted prayer basically asking God to help me if he even existed.

The next day I felt something different.

I felt…peaceful.

The pain was still all around, but I felt this quiet assurance that I would make it through school. I was going to get through this somehow.

The grief and darkness were still there but everyday afterwards that familiar feeling of Joy would appear too. Sometimes it faded quickly. Sometimes it would stick around for a little while.

I described it to my mom once. It was almost like the grief intensified my experience of everything. The pain was acute, but so was the Joy. The vulnerability broke me and opened me up to Love more fully and more deeply and to receive Love in the same way.

It was the most powerful experience of my life. It was so horrible, so difficult, but so beautiful. I felt literally carried in that time. Given every grace to messily make my way through the semester and finally…to graduate.

Faith was not a bandaid over a wound. Faith was transforming me through pain. It was changing me, allowing me to become someone who was more myself and yet so far from the person I was before.

I felt…free.

There was the Joy.

The Freedom.

There was God.

There was my beginning.

I still grieve. I still don’t understand the loss and I don’t think I ever will, but as I’ve gotten closer to God and grown in what it means to have faith, I experience Joy more and more. It’s the best feeling I think we’re given on earth. It’s the closest thing to freedom. Look deeper at the Joy. Look harder in suffering. I think God is there.