Practicing Joy: Week 4 – Joy in All Times

What do you think joy looks like?

 

 I think joy looks like bubbles or balloons among other things. We’ve talked that before – joy looks airborne… like you’re jumping up as high as you can go because you can’t help it. You want to know something funny? Joy wasn’t always like that, un-uh. Joy used to be much less floaty and more down to earth.

 

Think about when Noah and his family finally got off the ark – I think they were pretty joyful! And what was the first thing they did? They took a bunch of rocks and made an altar and told God thank you for seeing them safely through the flood.

 

We, tend to think about joy as a specific thing – maybe an actual thing, maybe a joyful event – but the people in the Bible thought about joy differently. Joy for them was a part of being one of the people of God – it was KNOWING that God was with them, had always been and would always be; that God made the world and everything in it for good, even when things don’t seem all that good; and that joy was and is about relationships – particularly our relationship with God, but also with the people God puts in our lives. That kind of joy lasts a whole lifetime, it is deeper and wider than the kind of joy we usually think about today, the jumping in the air kind of joy. 

 

That joy is kind of like a rainbow. The stuff that goes into making a rainbow is there all the time, sun and water. For us to see a rainbow, the sun just has to shine at the right angle at the right time to see it, but the ingredients are always there.

 

-Carolyn Hayes

Director of Children & Young Family Ministries