Nourishing hearts as faithfully as we nourish our tables.
Welcome to Season & Savor Sunday — because feeding our bodies is not enough.
These next few weeks, I’m breaking down Galatians 5:22-23; today we’re talking about joy.
“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!” Galatians 5:22-23 (NLT)
Last week I promised joy wouldn’t be the greeting-card kind. I meant it.
I’m writing this one running on fumes. It’s been a long week, the kind where you’re not sure you have anything left to say. And maybe that’s not a problem to apologize for. Maybe it’s the whole point. If joy only shows up when life is easy, it was never joy to begin with. That’s just a good week.
A Quick Look Back at Love
Last week I told you about a headache-pounding, physical-therapy kind of day, the one where I almost let my husband drive off to visit a friend’s mom alone because of a misunderstanding. I chose to get in the car anyway. Not because I felt loving. Because I decided not to make it a thing. Love, it turns out, is mostly a choice. You can read it all here.
Joy picks up right where that left off. Once you’ve chosen to love on a day you didn’t feel like it, you start to notice something. The feeling sometimes follows the choice. That’s joy’s whole game too.
What Joy Actually Is
Webster’s definition centers on a feeling, a delight that rises when things go well. That’s not wrong, just incomplete. The Greek word used in Galatians is chara. Here’s what stopped me: chara shares a root with charis, the word for grace. Joy and grace come from the same family. Which means joy was never something you manufacture. It shows up because grace already did.
What Joy Is Not
Joy is not happiness. Happiness depends on what’s happening. Good news, good mood. Bad news, and it packs its bags. Joy doesn’t work that way, and that’s why it’s worth talking about. Anybody can be in a good mood on a good day.
Joy also isn’t a mask. It’s not “choose joy” plastered over a bad moment like a sticker over a crack. If you just lost your patience with your kid, joy doesn’t mean slapping on a smile two minutes later and pretending it didn’t happen. That’s not joy. That’s masking with a filter.
How Do We Cultivate It
Nobody wakes up joyful by accident. It’s built the same way muscle is, slowly, sometimes painfully, usually while you’d rather be doing something else.
Gratitude is the on-ramp. Not the vague kind, the specific kind. Not “I’m grateful for my family” but “I’m grateful she texted me back today when I needed it.” Specific gratitude has a way of prying your eyes open to what’s actually true.
This week alone on my joy meter: fresh flowers on the coffee table. My silly pumpkin container holding my coffee pods, right on schedule for fall. Running into a friend on my morning walk. A FaceTime call with our oldest to catch up. Couch time with my husband on a slow Saturday morning. None of it dramatic. All of it real.
Remembering helps too. Looking back at the hard seasons you already survived and noticing you’re still here. That’s not nothing. That’s evidence of God’s grace.
And community. Joy is hard to hold onto alone. It needs witnesses.
This reminds me of dear friends of ours who lost their young adult daughter to cancer a few years back. When they were in the thick of treatments, wondering and questioning, our friends would talk through tears about holding joy and sorrow in the same hand. One minute sobbing with the ache, the next, praising God because He is good, and she knew that; she knows that. What an impact her walk had on me and how I live each day. It’s certainly not always easy, and I absolutely fail a lot in this department. I hope I’m in process, taking baby steps towards this kind of joy.
How Am I Doing In the Joy Department, Honestly
Some weeks, not great. This week, if I’m being straight with you, I’ve had more clenched jaw than open hands, and it was full of appointments that ran longer than expected, coming off a very joyous, full weekend with dear friends who were visiting. That’s the truth of it. But writing this reminded me that joy was never about feeling capable. It’s about staying tethered to something (some One) steadier than my own joy tank.
What about you? Not the Instagram answer. The real one.
Eleanor
I want to tell you about a friend. I’ll call her Eleanor.
Eleanor’s had a genuinely hard life. I’m not going to list it out, because it isn’t mine to lay bare, and the list was never the point. What matters is that through it all, she was joyful. Not cheerful in a performative way. Joyful in a way that had clearly been forged, not faked.
She led our church’s Women’s Ministry for years, and I had the privilege of being mentored by her, of serving under her. She was always pointing people back to a gratitude journal, always sharing an encouraging, not placating, word, always willing to stop and pray with you right there, always the one saying, “Look at what God has already done!” when the current chapter looked bleak. She didn’t deny the hard stuff. She just refused to let it have the final word.
Watching her taught me more about joy than any definition could. If she allowed her circumstances to decide, I’m pretty sure she’d have been a puddle.
Where This Leaves Us
Here’s what I do now. When life gets hard, I think of Eleanor and our friends. It stops me, and I recalibrate my joy meter. Not fake, not painted on. Just taking stock of what the Lord has actually done in my life, and He’s done so very much. The circumstance can still be difficult, still be painful, still be whatever it is. But when I look back at His faithfulness in the middle of it, I can choose joy.
I heard something this week that stuck with me, I believe from Alistair Begg, though I’m paraphrasing. Something like this: sometimes you don’t want to do the thing, the praying, the studying, the choosing joy. But once you start anyway, your spirit tends to follow. Before you know it, you’re fully in it, loving the very thing you almost skipped.
Nehemiah 8:10 says the joy of the LORD is your strength. Not your circumstances. Not your week. His joy.
So if it’s been a long one for you too, you’re in good company. Joy isn’t the absence of the hard week. It’s seeing what’s still standing after it.
~ With grace at the table, and beyond
I read and respond to every email and comment, and I’m so thankful for each of you who comes back week after week. It means more than you know when you make my recipes and share your thoughts 💚
Rate & Comment