I want you to pause for just a moment and recall something or someone that brings you pure joy. What’s the criteria that makes for pure joy?
Relationships are complicated, aren’t they? People come with the incredible mark of the Creator and really astound me in their uniqueness and abilities. I love watching people in their ‘zone’. You know what I mean, don’t you? I know a young woman, recently recorded, who sings with the purest voice I have ever heard. Emotion wells up from deep within me and tears are inevitable. I can’t quite explain it.
When someone speaks in a way that puts everything perfectly clear I find myself relaxing into their words. My son’s photography, as another example, captures a scene that takes my breath away. The compassion of my hospice friends as they care for the dying brings incredible peace into a situation that should or could be anything but peaceful. These are example of pure joy.
We, the people, also bring into our relationships immaturity, selfishness, misunderstanding, short-sightedness and emotional damage. There’s no use denying it. We can be a real pain to one another. The backside of pure joy.
There is something about a brand new life as a celebration of potential and pure joy.
The purest of joys, for me, is embodied in my granddaughter. She is growing up and learning to use the potty, speaking in full sentences, playing pretend and helping me in the kitchen and garden. She is young, of course. Her world revolves around her needs and experiences. She doesn’t understand everything we say. She can’t see into tomorrow. And, though it breaks my heart to realize it she has experienced trauma. Her ‘zone’ is simply being child-like.
Each stage is a celebration and I awake every day with praise to God on my lips that she is still in my world.
What if we were to live in such a way that we looked at one another as children journeying toward adulthood? What if we celebrated each stage of one anothers’ growth while patiently accepting one another’s life experience and choices as child-like? Would it foster greater joy in relationships?
I wonder if that’s how God sees us and can look on us, His children, with pure joy. I like to think so.
PS My feathered friend is a first attempt at another source of joy of late; water colour painting!
