Joy

[Dean62]

Joy is an intermezzo of gratitude that interrupts the routine motion of life. Our lives, for the most part, are motion and struggle. Most of us spend our time crawling, groping, climbing, sometimes running, but always moving like the works of a clock. But now and then joy comes to arrest the motion, it stops the tedious ticking of our life-clocks with the bracing discovery that we have received a gift. It works most magnificently when we feel our own life as if it were God's gift to us. Stilling, for a moment anyway, the haunting anxiety that maybe life is made only of the stuff that hurts and angers, and makes us feel small and stupid and phony, there comes a sense that life--now, here, today--is a gift worth blessing God for. When it comes, when this sense of being a gift comes, Joy has come to us.



Lewis B. Smedes, "What is Joy".

[toad]

Joy is a spiritual force. Joy is more than happiness. Happiness comes from the old English word "hap" which means happening, happen. Something has to happen to be happy. joy is totally different. Something might happen to create joy, and then again joy can just be, when nothing is going on.

Nehemiah said "The joy of the LORD is my strength." (8:10) I have found that in Scripture, the words joy and strength are interchangeable. Try it, where you see the word strength, substitute joy, and where you see the word joy, subtitute strength. I think that spiritual strength and joy are the same thing.

I can be bummed and have everything going wrong, but when I really think about what is going on in my life, my joy can come to the surface, and strengthen me like nothing else. Here are some things that I can think about to bring joy up: I am sober, I am alive, I am saved, I have a relationship with Jesus, I have a relationship with the Holy Spirit, my life and will have been turned over to the "care" of my Father, I have real friends who care, broken relationships have been restored, all my "needs" are taken care of. As you can see, joy and gratitude are intermingled together also, so therefore gratitude is strength also.

The serenity prayer brings us joy and therefore strength. "God, grant me the serenity (joy and gratitude) to accept the things I cannot change............

Thanks for letting me share.........God is doing for me what I could not do for myself.

toad...........................

[cmc]

Thank you dean for this thread and thanks to toad for sharing too.

I have on a few rare situtions experienced amazing joy in the midst of extreme sadness/unhappiness. I view happiness as a temporal, fleeting experience of my soul, and joy as an eternal and supernatural experience in my spirit.

[Lily]

Joy is not the absence of suffering, but the presence of GOD.