Expect Joy

Lately I’ve been a glass half empty kinda girl. I’ve been feeling defeat and despair and dullness where life and joy once teemed.

But God spoke to me yesterday.

After the tears on the phone to my mom. While washing dishes in the sink. While scraping day old coffee gunk from the bottom of a ceramic cup.

God spoke.

A melody at first. A refrain.

"restore unto me the joy of thy salvation..."

A Sunday school hymn.

And then the words of the living God. Whispered to me. To me?

"I will restore your joy."

Restore. Because something has been broken. Because something has been lost. Because something needs to be mended and tended.

My joy.

Psalm 51:10-12

"Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me."

I don't know what that means or when that means. But I believe it. And I want it.

I want a clean heart. A renewed spirit. A heart that expects God to show up. That expects joy.

Because he WILL restore my joy.

I am going to expect joy.

Maybe there is something to this naming of gifts, naming of joy. As I type these words, my heart settles. The panic panic grasping subsides. My fists unclench, open to receive this joy. Expectant. Vigilant in the pursuit of joy.

Vigilant in the pursuit of God.

Unthanksgiving

My New Year's reading has entailed one of the best books I've ever read: One Thousand Gifts, by Ann Voskamp. She writes about choosing, learning, deciding to see the gifts in our lives. To give thanks. To name our thanks. To name our gifts and reclaim our lives.

The book started with a map of her own tragedy. Of pooling tears and shut in grief and tamped down faith. I liked it then. I liked the acknowledgement of the pain of life; eyes that see "a world pocked with pain."

And then she shifts direction, subtly, like a shadow passing over, from grief to life, from ingratitude to grace. To see the world through different eyes. Eyes that see through the "losses that puncture our world" to God.

A dare to see a world where "that which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To him. To the God we endlessly crave."

I wanted to go with her. To see with her.

I have no problem believing in the power of words, of our thoughts, to transform our lives. I have no problem believing that there are immeasurable gifts of grace and delight sitting below our noses, below my computer to the sparkling gold-gilded placemats that dazzle the room--a literal and metaphorical gift to my roommate that now garnish our table.

But right now, drowning in year-end regrets and plowing through a quarter-life crisis, I don't want to be grateful.

I want to be justified in my discontent. I want to mourn what I've lost. The unmet expectations. The disappointment. The disillusionment. That I'm 25 and haven't published a best seller or met the man of my dreams.

Okay, those may seem too cliche or far-fetched to warrant empathy. But the disappointment is real. The daily defeat of not being who I thought I would be. The sum of a million unmet expectations, moments when I could have chosen to learn and grow and live fully, when instead I sulked and balked and grew more deeply discontent.

This is and isn't what I want.

I know I need gratitude. I know it is the only way to truly live. I know it is The Way.

In the book, Ann starts an audacious list of 1,000 gifts in her life.

I'm starting one too. Right now I'm merely going through the motions. But I pray my pen and my prayers and my lists will reveal the places pocked with pain as gifts, as "seeing-through-to-God-places." That I would end the attitude of unthanksgiving. That I would learn to live.

1. Honest words typed across a blank screen...

T.S. Wednesday: Making a Scene

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—"

It's not Tuesday, but my heart needs T.S. Eliot this morning. I need to be reminded that I'm not the first to question the darkness of God. To watch in alarm as the stage of my life dims, fearful of the dark, of the unknown. To lose hope in the changing of scenes. To mistake the dimming lights and the quiet rustle in the dark for the end. Not the beginning.

I say to soul, be still. And it says to me, "Yeah, right." I crouch, poised for action. If only I knew which step to take. What the next scene holds. But right now all I can sense is the movement of darkness on darkness. The creation of a scene not yet revealed to me.

And I say to my soul, be still. And wait for God to make a scene.