Joy

For a while now, I’ve had a picture in my head that represents my internal world. It’s a land by the sea, with a forest and a deep valley, and then an open space on the water. I’ve known that that open space was for building something, but it’s been a pit of dirt for years. The pit felt like a good place for a foundation to be laid, so I’ve been cleaning it out, getting all of the skeletons out of the closets, dealing with the dark things that come up when you descend into the deepest parts of yourself. I’ve spent a lot of time cleaning up that pit, ready to lay some cement, or whatever it is you use to pour a foundation. I am wondering, though, if God might be calling me in a different direction. 

There are a lot of ruins in this basement, a lot of old ghosts. A few weeks ago, I had an image of Jesus walking around those ruins, foundations laid long ago that are now cracked and broken, and I saw him pouring the oil of joy over them. Slowly, as the oil soaked in, the old ruins began to disintegrate, turning into a rich soil that began to fill this hole in the ground. Over time, the pit began to fill in, and after a while, it became clear that this space was never meant to be a new foundation. It was meant to turn into a garden.

Years ago, when I was grieving not getting a job I had longed for, I felt God tell me one thing: “Disappointment is not your name. Joy is your name.” I have spent my life battling disappointment. I’m a perfectionist, so resentment in me can run deep. I want to do the right thing, and I want the people around me to do the right thing. I devolve into a puddle of seething anger when I think injustice is being dealt through the hands of incompetence. I am still learning the art of forgiveness, and of letting God rework my anger into something beautiful. I have a hard time doing this for others, mostly because I have an impossible time doing it for myself. My plan my whole life has been to clear out the basement of my soul so that I could build something good. It turns out God’s plan was to use everything in that basement to bring about something even better; to allow it to fertilize something new. 

For a long time I thought that joy meant building something. I thought it meant creating something big and wonderful and magnificent. I am wondering, though, if joy is actually formed in tending and nurturing, and if it comes in planting seeds and cultivating life. I have spent my adult life waiting for big things to happen, but even when they do I am not satisfied. I am beginning to think satisfaction comes in the small acts of dealing with worms and planting seeds and pulling weeds. Maybe joy doesn’t come in building a palace; maybe it comes with your hands in the dirt of your own life. 

I know this is the same thing I have been saying over and over in all of these essays. I know I keep circling back to the same stuff. I think that’s because I haven’t quite learned how to live it, yet. I don’t even know how to garden — that’s next summer’s project. For now, I will learn to make bread and try to make candles and begin to enter into my life the way it is, right now. I will let go of my resentments, I will accept that things aren’t always they way I wished they would be, and I will step into the soil turned rich by my experiences and pain. I will move forward in cultivating the joy that I plant in this world, one day at a time, one seed at a time, one day at a time.