Need Joy?

I once received a note from a reader who’d been feeling rather blue. His solution? He turned a video camera on himself and preached a sermon.

He watched the replay and remarked, “That was the best sermon I ever did hear.”

We can laugh, but the truth is that at some point in our lives, we all need a message that will help us recover our joy. We need joy because as the prophet Nehemiah said, “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Some say that a believer without joy is a self-made weakling. That may be true, but as a mom who’s lost a child, I understand that seasons of grief slip into every life. But even hurricane seasons have an expiration date as the winds calm and the sun appears. But what can we do to combat our own storms of grief, discouragement, or the blues?

What if, in many cases—maybe even your case—the answer is simple: you simply choose joy? Too easy?

Consider this:

My husband and I were visiting family in Beaumont, Texas, when we decided to hop in a small Cessna and fly to Corpus Christi, a 300-mile flight down the Texas coastline.

My problem was I was terrified of small planes, and this Cessna had already given us trouble. The engine would stall, and we’d have to make one emergency landing after the other.

Even so, we took off into a blue November sky and headed for the Texas coast. I decided it was my job to play lookout. I would watch for flat places stable enough to make an emergency landing just in case the engine conked out.

What I didn’t know was how wild the Texas coast is. It’s mostly devoid of towns because they wash away in the occasional hurricane. Not only is the Texas coast wild, it’s swampy, free of roads, runways, and shopping mall parking lots. As for the sandy beach, it’s covered with debris and scattered cows.

My imagination played a continuous loop of an episode of my rendition of The Worst Case Scenario; the engine sputters, we dive down for a landing on the beach but the nose of the

plane sticks into the sand, hits a cow, and we flip end over end. SPLAT. Game over.

My second choice was to land in the green waves of the Gulf. Sure, our wings would float, but the plane’s cab would be submerged beneath the surface. BLUB!

That was a shock. I’d been too fearful to notice.

The following year, we decided to take the same flight from Beaumont to Corpus in the same plane. But this time, I made the choice to fly with joy.

When I looked down from the sky to watch the waves roll onto the sandy beach, I felt the same old fear. So, I prayed, “Lord, I give You my fear. I choose to trust You. I choose joy.”

I felt peace but my panic kicked in. There was nothing else to do but to repeat my prayer. Soon I realized I was enjoying the afternoon. Did you know that there are wild longhorns on the Texas beach, and a couple of old boat wrecks? And how the waves sparkle. They look like sequins, glistening in the setting sun. Funny, I hadn’t noticed that before.

When we landed in Corpus, I was the first one to hop out of the plane. I turned to my hubby and surprised him with, “Wasn’t that a beautiful flight on a beautiful day?!”

Joy is always a choice because even though we can’t control our circumstances, we can choose to trust God and believe He’s working out everything for our good.

We can choose to refresh our minds with the Word of God and pray our way back to the state we all wish to live in, the state of joy. This is the reason I wrote my latest book, Make Time for Joy, Scripture Powered Prayers to Brighten Your Day.

I hope you will make a choice for joy, read a good word from the Word, and pray a prayer of trust. If you do, you’ll discover joy will transform not only your face, but your life.

Linda Evans Shepherd is the founder and CEO of Right to the Heart Ministries and the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association and Arise Esther Evenings. She is publisher of Leading Hearts Magazine and the author of 38 books. You can connect with Linda for an interview at: NRBInterviewLink.com.