This morning I listened to a podcast by two of my favorite authors, Jen Hatmaker and Brene Brown. The topic of joy came up, which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. You may have seen some of my posts about joy over on Instagram lately.
I’m curious to know what you think when you hear people talk about joy. Do you feel inspired? Do you feel happy, because it makes you reflect on joy in your life? Do you get squirmy, because you don’t feel you’re worthy enough of joy? Are you cynical about it? Does it feel mystical?
Brene Brown said “The thing that everyone wants to know- how do we get to joy? But no one wants to talk about what gets in the way of joy and what you have to walk through to get there. This is something you have to walk through to get there.” Boom- mic drop. The words of this wise woman never fail to get my wheels spinning.
J-O-Y. Man, kids really get it, don’t they? I watch my kids find joy in the smallest things- weirdest things even. Dragging every stuffed animal out of their rooms onto the couch into a pillow-fort? JOY. Playing outside in a dirt pile for hours? JOY. Letting a caterpillar crawl on their arm? JOY. Making fart noises in the car and blaming each other? JOY.
As adults, it gets more complicated. What happens to our spirits as we grow up? Society begins to tell us what joy looks like. We chase others’ joy. We sacrifice our own to fulfill others. We’re made to feel shameful about choices or things that happen that are out of our control, so we tell ourselves we don’t deserve it. Someone else tells us we don’t deserve it. We expect joy to be so blatant that it’s served to us on a silver platter and delivered to our front door. Amongst all that mess, we forget what true, authentic joy looks and feels like.
As I chewed on the words of Dr. Brown, it hit me that maybe we have to go through all of that complicated mess. Maybe we do have to lose joy to find it again. But how do we get back to it? How do we rekindle our inner child like spirit and find the gifts and opportunities of joy that are all around us?
I believe the answer is, we look for it. We stop thinking of it as mythical. We stop believing that one of us deserves it more than the other. We stop believing that God has hidden it from us like a needle in a haystack. We stop believing that there’s only so much to go around.
We open our eyes- right now- wherever we are on our walk, and we look. Look behind, and give thanks for the road traveled, look down, and give thanks for the feet that continue to carry you, look ahead, and give thanks for the blessings that are yet to come.
