Stacking Up Joy

Psalm 73:23

Yet I am always with you;

you hold me by my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel,

and afterward you will take me into glory.

I knew God was going to speak.

I knew he had a message. A promise. An image.

And sure enough, he did.

"Someone is running in the dark, past all of these closed doors. But God rushes in and takes your hand; suddenly you are running with him in the light—free," she said.

I knew the image was for me.

I know the light has been promised. The joy will be forthcoming. The twirls and running and sensation of grass springing beneath my toes will be a reality.

I don't doubt it.

But I can't feel it. Right now--even after prayer upon prayer--I don't feel the joy and I can't see the light. Not yet.

But I don't doubt it.

The one thing I know is that I won't fake it. There is a time when I would have faked it, so hard it would almost tear me apart.

But today I will not fake it. The God who promises me light is smart enough to know that I'm not there yet. He's patient enough to give me the grace to grapple. To say, God I don't feel this joy that you talk about. I trust it is coming. I pray for the strength to ask for it.

I feel it fragments. In moments. In glimpses and hand squeezes and heads bowed and tears pricking.

But this picture of overwhelming light and sun and freedom--I don't feel it yet.

I love the image of stacking up truths. I like the idea of the addition, the stacking, the summation of experiences and truths and ideas.

But lately I've been challenged on this mindset. For what good is truth without love or joy?

I could stack up sad, pathetic truths for days.

1. The world is a place of deep pain and intolerable suffering.

2. God doesn’t always answer prayer.

3. People I love get sick, trapped in destructive patterns, move away, move out of my life.

4. I can't seem to get ahead of this curve of depression and burnout.

…..Etc. etc. until I can't get out of bed.

But where does this get me?

This keeps me in the dark, sprinting, heaving past closed doors.

There is another truth I can choose to see: the light wins.

God grabs my hand and sets me free.

Will I build my life around the darkness or will I build my life around the joy?

In One Thousand Gifts Ann Voskamp writes, "Do not disdain the small. The whole of life - even the hard - is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole ... There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments add up."

The moments add up.

The joy adds up.

I want a life stacked on joy.

God, I ask for the courage and discipline to choose to see the good. To unclench my fearful fists so you can take my hand.

Even in the darkness--in the not yet--I can stack these moments. I will stack the little joy and I will build my life on your promises:

Aly, you will grow. I will comfort you. I will restore your joy. I love you.

I thank you for the glimpses. The fragments. That which I see in part that will one day be given to me in whole.

I thank you God for the hope of most this amazing joy. Please guide me with your counsel and take me to your glory. Amen.

T.S. Tuesday: The Lost and Found Pile of My Faith

“There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again.” T.S. Eliot, East Coker*

God answers prayer. Sometimes I forget this. Sometimes I lose this. Sometimes I find this. Then I lose it again. Daily I fight to recover what has been lost.

Today, this post, is a fight to recover and reaffirm my childlike faith.

As Ann Voskamp said in the chapter in One Thousand Gifts that I just read, “I confess, even after all that I’ve seen and tasted and touched, I do scoff.”

After I, Aly Lewis, have seen and tasted and touched and felt that the Lord is good, I still scoff. I scoff at my cheesiness in writing “childlike faith,” I scoff at this blog and my prayers seeking answers, I scoff at my lists of gifts and my love letters to myself.

But I have seen and tasted and touched and felt that the Lord is good. And I will not let my scoffing get the best of me. Instead I will keep writing, keep praying, and keep saying, 'Thank you, Love, for being good.'

***

*I promise I will one day venture out of the Four Quartets, but as long as I keep rediscovering nuggets of wisdom within these four pieces, Four Quartets it is. Please show your discontent by sending me wonderfully aged, used copies of additional T.S. Eliot compilations. Otherwise, I will take your silence as consent.

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...