Following is an excerpt from where he has written about “joy”:
“There aren’t any easy answers to the big questions that haunt us and hunt us down. Friends commit suicide. Grandparents die awkwardly and alone in nursing homes. We get fired. We have affairs. Our kids get hooked on drugs. Time and gravity wear is down as we travel across this vale of tears.
Yet when we have hope, we have refuge. I like how Paul put it: “We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16 NIV). Or, as Eugene Peterson paraphrases it in The Message, “we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace.” And grace is always stronger than my circumstances.
Every day we’re both wasting away and being renewed. When God’s Spirit moves, joy is reborn, and our lives, once new, can continually be renewed through faith and the promises of faith.
Here is what I have to keep reminding myself: pain is real, but so is joy. Every moment, hope is available. Even now peace can be mine. And the sparkling moments of joy that make life worth living are just as much a part of our world as the speeding tickets and funerals. When you take the time to look at both sides of the equation, you realize that life is both more depressing and more delightful that you thought.”
Then later he writes:
There is a heaviness to the lightness of Christianity, a somberness to the joy, a depth to the levity, because for every Easter there is a Good Friday.” . . . “Christians are enmeshed in a terrible, glorious, light and airy, deep and troubling joy”
James states it far better than I could ever hope to but what strikes me is that in the midst of tears and loss and pain and struggles it is possible and even Biblical to have and experience joy. That is an amazing aspect of Christianity that I think is very profound.
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