Throughout the last 6 months, the Lord has been taking me on a journey to find joy. If you knew me pre-Race, you can probably attest to the fact that I was a pretty negative person, a person who saw the glass as half empty, a person who expected and saw the worst in everything and everyone, including myself. My life was not one filled with joy, especially joy that was unconditional. I knew that joy was not the same as happiness. I knew that happiness was an emotion that came and went and was based on circumstances and that joy was deeper than that. What I didn’t know was how to have that deep, unconditional joy that was written about in the Bible. That type of joy seemed unattainable to me. Nothing I tried brought that joy.
Going on the Race didn’t make finding that joy any easier. It didn’t matter that I was surrounded by awesome Christian women or that I was doing ministry everyday or that I was working with kids. Yes, I began to experience more of God’s joy, but I still didn’t know how to make it last. The joy I had was still based on what was happening around me, and there are a lot of times when I didn’t feel that joy. The joy experienced was just a glimpse of what I wanted.
During our debrief in Nicaragua, I read a book called 1000 Gifts by Ann Voskamp. It is a book that is all about thankfulness, not only in the good times but also in the hard. It is about a woman who made a list of 1000 things she was thankful for and how she continued to make a list past the original 1000 things. Sometimes those things were very small; there were days when those small things were all she could find to thank God for. That in itself was not necessarily new information, because it was something I had actually started doing before the Race. I didn’t know that the book was also going to talk about how being thankful led to joy. I didn’t anticipate the book being a major stepping stone in changing my outlook on joy and essentially changing my life.
See, what I learned was that joy is all about having gratitude and having gratitude is all about perspective. My perspective was off, and I realized to have the joy I had been missing, I had to first change my perspective of how I viewed the world around me. When things got hard, as they often did, I had to pause and find the positive, the thing(s) I could thank God for in that moment. If I did that, I wouldn’t be weighed down by the struggle. Instead, I would experience joy. This joy wasn’t based on my surroundings, therefore it wasn’t temporary (unless I chose to give into negativity in the next struggle). I found that joy was truly something I could choose. It wasn’t based on anything but me choosing to be thankful and trust God in every moment, whether good or bad.
Every day is filled with beautiful mountain views and stormy seas. I have experienced many highs in my life and many lows. I will continue to have highs and lows until I reach heaven. Even so, (when I choose joy) it is well with my soul.
