Joy

I find it hard right now to write about joy, as my joy has been stripped down to bare bones by an unwavering look into the face of poverty. Much of these past two years I have found my joy has abandoned me. I have seen the gaps of the world, now – the places where humans fall through; the camps, the streets, the trafficking. Even in the country where we are supposed to have it all, we cannot always care for people. We bring them out of camps only to watch them struggle to maintain exorbitant rent and grocery prices. And in the face of these chasms where humans fall through, I confess that I lost my joy. 

I didn’t think that writing about joy would mean writing about grief, but somehow they are all mixed up inside me. In fact, it sometimes feels as though the joys are born of grief. I will hopefully be writing about joy for a long time, so I don’t feel pressure right now to resolve it all in my heart and in my head. Back in 2017, I was in my 7th year of really following Christ, and I chose the words joy and jubilee in celebration. I decided that every seventh year I would take a rest from choosing new words – that joy and jubilee would be my words those years, hopefully engraining in me the phrase I have chosen for my mission statement: to cultivate joy. But in both of these years that joy has been my word, I have struggled to find it. In 2017, it was not getting a job I desperately wanted, and watching as a 12-year-old girl I knew and loved lived in the worst kind of abuse and trauma. I was living with a family at the time, and they had planted a wildflower bed that summer. I remember sitting out on the back porch, sipping a cup of coffee and looking out at those flowers, wondering how there could be such beauty in the world intermingled with such pain.

My most traumatic memory from 2017 was of taking a middle school girl to the hospital after she disclosed to me that she had been horrifically abused. I sat outside in the hallway, and wondered why a child was crying so loudly in one of the rooms, until I realized it was her. My stomach turned. I can still hear it. But what I also remember, and what I forget is part of the same memory, is a moment earlier that evening, where I sat on the floor of our youth pastor’s house and listened to her story as he cut up watermelon. I remember how she and I always remembered the watermelon – that we were talking about unspeakable things, but somehow we all ended up laughing at one point over some silly inside joke about watermelon. I remember what it felt like for a secret to come out of it’s hiding place, out of the dark, and into the light. I remember how it felt to sit with her in that moment, surrounded by people I loved, none of us choosing to look away. It is an almost sacred memory for me, and I forget that it was that same night I heard her scream-cry in that sterile hospital room.

I am in the midst of a prolonged version of that moment, now – not the same in many ways, but filled with the same kind of anger and confusion and grief. I watch over and over again as people with trauma are traumatized once again by life in America, and knowing I am powerless to stop it from happening. But there are still wildflower moments — watermelon moments. The other day, I went to my new friend’s house to show her how to use a shower liner. She made injera bread and lentils, and we communicated with a translator, and at the end I looked at her and put my hand on her shoulder and said, “it will be okay.” She looked at me, and at my mom, and said, “you both are my sisters.” That is joy, I think. Joy is laughing through a mouthful of lentils when there is still a mountain of maintenance concerns to deal with, rent to be paid, jobs to be secured. In the face of these horrors, joy seems so small. I wonder, then, if that is why I miss it. I am looking for big, sweeping joy – something to take away the things I don’t understand, and to fill the gaps and chasms humanity falls into. But joy is rebellious – it does not operate the way we ask it to. Joy forever speaks in the small and mundane, in a hand on a shoulder, in presence, in lentils, in eye contact. Joy is small, joy is slow, and joy is vulnerable – but joy is not fragile. In the face of pain, in a world full of suffering and trauma, joy remains strong.

I am beginning to understand more than ever how “the joy of the Lord is my strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). I suppose I always thought that this meant joy was grand and extravagant. What I know now is that joy is like olive oil – it begins with crushing. The hard, exterior shell of the olive is pulverized – literally ground to bits. After this, the olive paste is pressed, the water and oil being squeezed out of every bit of crushed olive. Finally, the oil is filtered from the water, and you have clean, pure, extra virgin olive oil. This oil is often used as a metaphor for joy in Scripture – “the oil of gladness” (Psalm 45:7). What we forget is that this gladness is first born of crushing, then of pressing, then of filtering. This is joy. Joy is the deepest knowing – the knowing that comes at the bottom of the darkness, that God is good, and God is strong — like olive oil; like wildflowers; like watermelon.