Puzzle Piece of Joy
Joy and happiness – are they really the same? I love to search out meanings of words. The dictionary defines happiness as the state of being happy so I looked up happy which is defined as
showing pleasure or contentment
Synonyms for happy include words like cheery and jovial.
Joy is defined as:
a feeling of great pleasure and happiness
Synonyms include delight, jubilation, triumph
Yet there is also the context that joy is a good feeling in the soul and I checked a Biblical definition of joy.
Joy is an emotion that is acquired by the anticipation or expectation of something great and wonderful
When I read in James 1:2 that we should have joy in all our trials I find that joy and happiness are no longer the same. When my youngest daughter was born and lay in a coma, fighting for her life with a five percent chance to live I was not delighted or jubilant. I had no great pleasure in the situation nor was I happy and contented. I prayed, I cried and I found the shadows of this puzzle piece in my life to be deep, dark and frightening. I questioned why this was happening even while I believed that God could heal my baby.
Yet while I cried and felt deep pain and sorrow, I also felt a joy – an anticipation of the amazing things God could and would do. This joy had no basis in what was happening around me. Circumstances did not dictate whether I felt joy. To me this helped me, after my baby survived, the meaning of having joy in the midst of trials. When I gave the horrible circumstance, the uncertainty of life to God, he gave me a peace that was beyond anything I had ever felt and with that came a joy – an anticipation of something beyond human expectations or abilities.
Joy that only God could supply helped heal my broken heart during this tough time in my life. Tears still flowed. I still felt an impatience for life to be more like what I had expected. I still hated to see my little one struggle to do things that most of us take for granted. She is now thirty-five years old. Everything she can do is medially impossible. God granted a miracle but it did not look anything like I expected. There have been health concerns, seizures, learning disabilities and a longing for acceptance and friends that has not always come. I am unhappy about these times but the outward circumstances do not dictate the joy inside only the outward happiness which is dependent on situations.
Have you found the puzzle piece of joy in your life? How does God help you through the unhappy times in life?
Posted: October 10th, 2017 under puzzle pieces of life, Storytelling.