What if your broken marriage, struggling kids, or that job you hate, never gets better? Would Jesus be more than a cliché of “enough”? Could you have joy? I’ve been asking myself this a lot lately. I love that song, “You’re never going to let me down.” I abstractly trust that “He turns graves into gardens.” But if I don’t get to see those gardens until heaven? What then?
I made the mistake of making “joy” my word of the year. I Thessalonians 1:6 talks about joy in suffering. Bleh. I wanted joy, but not in hardship. I know abstractly that joy in good times isn’t true joy, but happiness. I realize cognitively that real joy isn’t dependent on my circumstances but having peace and contentment when life looks most hopeless. Joy happens when what I read in Scripture is realized, that apart from the Lord I have no good thing (Psalm 16:2). That I am complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10). That because the Lord is my Shepherd,
I lack nothing (Psalm 23:1) –
Even if the hardest things in my life never change.
But I wanted a giggling, demonstrative joy. I wanted it to feel it poetic and glamourous. That’s the joy I wanted. But instead, joy arrived slowly and painfully. God was using what felt like waves trying to drown me to de-throne my idols. Idols I’ve looked to for so long to provide me joy, and idols that never seemed to satisfy what I craved. Joy arrived almost imperceptibly as I rediscovered its source in the midst of my suffering,
Jesus’ pure and profound love for and delight in me.
The brokenness I’ve experienced the past few weeks felt at times like more than I could endure. But in that pit, I began to believe more deeply that God was enough, though the hardest thing in my life hadn’t changed. And in that place of deeper faith – trusting what I could not see or feel – My Shepherd, my therapist, and some dear friends are helping me experience joy and trust, beyond mere cognition, that apart from God’s love in Christ Jesus,
I lack nothing.