Choosing joy

Today it's 61 degrees, and I am healthy, and I am saved, and I can number my children, and I have a job, and a house, and food in the fridge, and good friends I'm not on the outs with.

And I noticed while driving in my car that I was carrying around that low-level anxiety we are wont to carry around every day unawares. And I was not living in the present moment, not really, but in that vaguely future-oriented mode that mindlessly imagines a problem-free day next Tuesday.

And then I thought to myself: Man, if I can't have joy on a day like this, then I will never have joy! It was very clear to me that it is not a change of circumstances that will usher in joy-because my circumstances today are as good as they get. It was clear that if I am ever to have joy, I must choose joy. The Lord says it: Choose joy. "Rejoice in the Lord always!" Just do it, child. Rejoice.

We can waste a lifetime waiting for joy, only to find on Judgment Day that it wasn't the Lord who didn't show up, but it was we who kept pushing away the natural Spirit-fruit of joy by our obsessive and self-protective worry-as if all our worrying could make anything good happen at all.

The Lord has divvied up life in the healthiest way for man: "Trust in the LORD and do good" (Psalm 37:3). There are two things in that short verse that, if followed, allow the unimpeded flow of peace and joy into the human heart. One is to do the present moment's duty (which is all we can ever do, really). The other is to then commit the result into the Lord's hands.

Choose joy, brethren. Let us not put it off. It honors Him because it is a token of our trust, like nothing else is.