Our Easter services Sunday were packed and mind-blowing. It was a wonderful day. One moment in particular keeps ringing in my brainbox. It was when my dear friend Claudia shared a deep, enlightening reflection on joy.
Claudia was standing alone at the microphone in front of hundreds of people on the second anniversary of her husband's terribly premature passing, and she observed that anxieties, anger, jealousy and all the other fear-based mindsets and emotions will jump in and demand to be heard, but joy sits quietly on the shelf, not demanding our attention at all, but always waiting for us to turn and reach for it.
Brilliant. So true. We can easily pass up joy in our lives. It happens all the time. Joy is a chosen response, not an automatic reaction, in most cases.
Me, personally...I plan on reaching for it a lot more. There is so much in my world I can respond to with joy, and I have begun to be more mindful as a result of Claudia's words. The sky was blue and the air wonderfully crisp as I walked to work this morning. So what if I was walking because I had blown the engine in my car? There was joy to be reached for and quietly encountered right there on the street I normally zip down at 45 mph.
Life is 10% stimulus and 90% response. Most days I collect grievances and stack mishaps, building walls of resentment that shut out potentially extraordinary insight. I forget: Stimulus sets the agenda, but response shapes the day.
Like the car that won’t move one cold Spring morning, aren’t most of the aggravations of a given day really just the sudden, temporary absence of some ordinary blessing between points A and B? Let us pause in the sacred space between from and to, where much that is good appears 364/365ths of the time. Let us recognize that joy is almost always an option. Why wouldn't we choose to reach for it?
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