Count It All Joy

Author: Marvin Lindsay
March 07, 2024

The main agenda item at our Annual Meeting was our new Vision statement: Christ’s joy, justice, and compassion, in all, through all, and for all. One person shared this idea: that our prayers in Sunday worship would lift up our joys as well as our sorrows and concerns. I remarked that there is a tradition in Rotary Club meetings of sharing “Good Stuff.” You can share something that’s brought you joy, but you have to pay a dollar to do that. For this reason, in my former Rotary chapter this moment of sharing was called “Happy Bucks.” However, I admitted, establishing this tradition in a worship service might be a bit crass!

We invite you to use the Prayer Request Portal at our website to share your joys as well as your concerns. We will lift them up in prayer free of charge! 

But what is joy? Often, we think that joy and happiness are the same. Or we define joy as that state of being when we are untroubled by sorrow. But as poet Ross Gay points out, to get out of sorrow is to get out of life. Each day we live, even if it is a great day, brings us closer to death. As long as we walk in the valley of the shadow of death, we will suffer. 

Gay argues that joy turns up when we figure out how to tend to one another in our suffering. Joy requires sorrow. In his latest book, Gay tells the story of caring for his father the last five months of his life. Gay says that his father was a good dad, but the two of them were a lot alike, and as a result they struggled. By taking care of him at the end, and his father allowing Gay to care for him, their relationship changed profoundly for the better. They didn’t go to therapy, but they did go to a lot of doctor’s appointments together and watched a lot of dumb TV shows together. The result was joy. And Gay’s joyful heartbreak incited more care. Gay believes that he has become more attuned to his mother’s strengths and devastations since his father died—perhaps even because he died.

Gay’s testimony reminds me of James 1:2, “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face various trials, consider it all joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance complete its work, so that you may be complete and whole, lacking in nothing.”

So, share your happinesses, and we will lift them up in prayer. Share your joys as well, those moments of peace, reconciliation, and love whose flip side is suffering. 

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