“In His presence is the fullness of joy and whether I go through the wilderness or stand on a mountain with God, I know I want to be with Him. So with my feeble knees and weak hands, I open myself up to His leading into the barren places of my life. I trust Him to guide me tenderly through the wilderness and I’m grateful that He responds gently to my cries for another way. This season, I’m praying that God leads us to the exact places where we can most experience His life and find true joy.”
I quoted my friend, Mary Katherine, in this blog I wrote in my first month on the Race.
I am now finishing my last month on the Race. (WHAT)
This prayer couldn’t have been more perfect for me this year. “that God leads us to the exact places where we can most experience His life and find true joy.”
I can say that I have experienced life and felt joy in a multitude of ways: in the smiles of innocent children, in the laughter of young men and women who have been freed and rescued from selling their bodies, in the “I got it!!” moments of teaching, in the hugs that make you feel home, in the bicycle rides through a country devoted to idol worship, in the hours of playing dominoes and monopoly with the homeless, in the furthering of disciples within a church, in the provisions of warmth to cold and penniless widows, in the desperate cries of an abandoned toddler, in the caution of closed countries, in the celebration of teammates’ victories over their sin and freedom from their chains…the list is practically never ending.
I began my journey with pneumonia; In Guatemala was sick again with a bacterial parasite; at the end of El Salvador, I travelled back to the USA in April and spent the month there recovering from a broken ankle and broken foot; in Malawi, my entire team was down for a week – stomach issues again!; in Thailand received another bacterial infection; and now in Malaysia down again dealing with repercussions of my foot injury.
It was those times that God led me to the exact place where I could most experience His life and find true joy.
I learned that these past 11 months, I experienced His life and found true joy in resting and waiting.
That sentence honestly sounds crazy to me: I am not good at either of those things, in fact – I am miserable when I have to do them; I feel like I am coming unhinged when I am forced into them.
It is in the resting and the waiting, however, that I become the most vulnerable, the most humbled, the most surrendered, the most teachable.
My journey began and has continued, intermittently, with options to rest and experience Him in the fullness that He intended for me this year.
My journey began with an option to find true joy in the resting and my journey is ending with an option to not only find but choose true joy in the resting.
I often thought of this “choosing joy” as code for “feeling content and happy while being in my present circumstance.”
Finding and choosing true joy has nothing to do with how elated we feel. Choosing true joy, in its absolute rawest form is to be so in tune with Jesus that regardless of your circumstance you are joyous because you are with Him: because you ARE His. True joy is not tied down to or limited by human emotion. True joy is, however, completely tied to the true giver of it.
True joy is the everyday, hand in hand, step by step, surrendering of self, relationship with Jesus: through the good times, through the worst times, through the “impossible” times, through the abundant times, through frugal times, through the small menial everyday-task-oriented-life times, through the desolate huge wilderness times, through the special times, through the celebratory times…
God has led us into this place of finding true joy by offering Jesus as an access to inherit it by taking part in His Kingdom. Let us thirst for that.
I challenge you to survey your year: see those places where you most experienced His life, where you most experienced Jesus.
If you have a relationship with Jesus: I challenge you to wake up each morning and consciously choose joy, because when you do – you are choosing to display the giver. you are choosing to lay down your own desires and clothe yourself with His. you are choosing to experience His life and His true joy because ‘in His presence is the fullness of joy’…
…and it’s incredible.
