A More Joyous Experience

God, Joy, Life 0

When we are aligned with God, our heart does lighten and we do experience the humor that is present in life. Freed from the pressure of trying to make life happen as we think it should happen, we are able to enjoy the ebb and flow of emotions and events as they do happen. We begin to be able to play more keys on our emotional piano than just the melancholy and dramatic ones. We begin to be able to experience the full range of responses that are part of our human nature….

When we begin to experience God more directly, less through our intellect and more through our heart, more experientially and less theoretically, we begin to have a more joyous experience. We discover we have access to a broader range of human emotions in our own responses to daily life. We feel the way we do feel not the way we should feel, and we discover that the way we do feel is acceptable to God who, after all, gave us the full range of human emotions we are now willing to undergo.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 135-136

Joy in Small Miracles

Gratitude, Growth, Joy, Life 0

Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.

It is true, I never stop wanting to learn the hard eucharisteo for the deathbeds and dark skies and the prodigal sons. But I accept this is the way to begin, and all hard things come in due time and with practice…. Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant — a seed — this plants the giant miracle. The miracle of eucharisteo, like the Last Supper, is in the eating of crumbs, the swallowing down one mouthful. Do not disdain the small. The whole of the life — even the hard — is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole. These are new language lessons, and I live them out. There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up.

I, too, had read it often, the oft-quoted verse: “And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:20). And I, too, would nod and say straight-faced, “I’m thankful for everything.” But in this counting gifts, to one thousand, more, I discover that slapping a sloppy brush of thanksgiving over everything in my life leaves me deeply thankful for very few things in my life. A lifetime of sermons on “thanks in all things” and the shelves sagging with books on these things and I testify: life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time.

— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, p. 57

Precious Ordinary Moments

Gratitude, Joy, Life 0

I think I learned the most about the value of ordinary from interviewing men and women who have experienced tremendous loss such as the loss of a child, violence, genocide, and trauma. The memories that they held most sacred were the ordinary, everyday moments. It was clear that their most precious memories were forged from a collection of ordinary moments, and their hope for others is that they would stop long enough to be grateful for those moments and the joy they bring. Author and spiritual leader Marianne Williamson says, “Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.”

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 84

Fighting Scarcity with Gratitude

Gratitude, Joy, Trials 0

These are anxious and fearful times, both of which breed scarcity. We’re afraid to lose what we love the most, and we hate that there are no guarantees. We think not being grateful and not feeling joy will make it hurt less. We think if we can beat vulnerability to the punch by imaging loss, we’ll suffer less. We’re wrong. There is one guarantee: If we’re not practicing gratitude and allowing ourselves to know joy, we are missing out on the two things that will actually sustain us during the inevitable hard times.

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 82

Twinkle Lights

Faith, Gratitude, Inspiration, Joy, Trust 0

Twinkle lights are the perfect metaphor for joy. Joy is not a constant. It comes to us in moments — often ordinary moments. Sometimes we miss out on the bursts of joy because we’re too busy chasing down extraordinary moments. Other times we’re so afraid of the dark that we don’t dare let ourselves enjoy the light….

I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith.

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 80-81

Tender and Vulnerable Joy

Joy, Life 1

In another very unexpected discovery, my research also taught me that there’s no such thing as selective emotional numbing. There is a full spectrum of human emotions and when we numb the dark, we numb the light. While I was “taking the edge off” of the pain and vulnerability, I was also unintentionally dulling my experiences of good feelings, like joy. Looking back, I can’t imagine any research finding that has changed what my daily life looks like more than this. Now I can lean into joy, even when it makes me feel tender and vulnerable. In fact, I expect tender and vulnerable.

Joy is as thorny and sharp as any of the dark emotions. To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees — these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. In fact, addiction research shows us that an intensely positive experience is as likely to cause relapse as an intensely painful experience.

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 72-73

Going Somewhere

God, Gratitude, Growth, Joy, Life, Peace 0

In the Genesis poem that begins the Bible, life is a pulsing, progressing, evolving, dynamic reality in which tomorrow will not be a repeat of today, because things are, at the most fundamental level of existence, going somewhere.

When Jesus tells the man that there are rewards for him, he’s promising the man that receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.

How we think about heaven, then, directly affects how we understand what we do with our days and energies now, in this age. Jesus teaches us how to live now in such a way that what we create, who we give our efforts to, and how we spend our time will all endure in the new world.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 44-45

Uniquely Suited for a Rich Life

Core Value, Growth, Healing, Joy 1

One of the things that you will be asked to do in the pages that follow is to abandon a mind-set in which you live the remainder of your life as if you are still experiencing your trauma. You may argue that given what you went through you are permanently damaged or scarred, that your baggage will be with you forever. I’m not here to tell you to get over it. I’m here to help you get past it. I will make the argument that you’re richer now — stronger, more empathic, and more in touch with your core values — than you were before you were challenged by what you went through. I don’t just believe that trauma survivors can go on to live rich, happy lives; I believe that they’re uniquely suited to do so.

— Alicia Salzer, MD, Back to Life, p. xxiv-xxv

The Pleasure of Reading

Beauty, Books, Joy, Reading 0

The sheer luxury of reading and reveling in the world I live in is something I treasure. Life is more than meat and potatoes and duties. Learning to see, to laugh, and to enjoy encounters with others is reason enough to read. The world has comedy built into it; the ridiculous is but to be explored. Every reader knows the pleasure of being transported to another world in books.

— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 26

The Jesus Story

Faith, Forgiveness, God, Joy, Life, Love, Truth, Universalism 0

This love compels us to question some of the dominant stories that are being told as the Jesus story. A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance of anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. viii