Choosing Joy


“Choose joy,”
Oft-repeated advice that, on the surface, makes sense,
Dig a little deeper, and it can be very unhealthy,
Dig down to the depths and it can be beautiful,
“Choose joy,”

It does not mean
To suppress negative emotions,
To cut off the parts of yourself that feel pain,
Isolating them behind a wall even as Fortunato, left to console himself only with his wine
while he died a slow and painful death in darkness and isolation, was walled away from the world
by one who could not stand him,
To pretend that everything is perfectly fine when your mind, body, and spirit are screaming at you
That you are in a place that requires knowing sadness, loss, anger, grief
In short, choosing joy does not mean to choose not to feel pain,
It does not mean choosing to ignore the facets of Yahweh that can only be found in the depths of destruction,
It is so much more

It is recognizing Yahweh in the darkness as much as the light,
It is enduring the manifestation of your greatest fears and knowing that you are still here after all,
It is weeping for hours on the floor of the bathroom unable to breathe through the heartache
and trusting that it will be okay, that the heartache will not last forever
It is screaming obscenities into the night while beating the floor in a tantrum worthy of a three-year-old
as you allow Yahweh to rearrange everything about the way you believed and allowing Yahweh to rearrange
everything you ever thought you knew or believed,
It is climbing onto a cross and feeling the sharpness of the nails in your hands as your diaphragm
is no longer able to expand to allow you to take that life-giving breath and learning to find other sources of
oxygen,
It is committing your Spirit to a higher plane and losing absolutely everything you ever built
to lay in a tomb that didn’t even belong to you in the first place as you sink to the depths of Hell
itself and place yourself in captivity so that you can lead captivity captive

Choosing joy is not so superficial as once thought,
It’s not about smiles and the kind of faith that only works if everything turns out okay,
It’s not even about believing that everything is going to turn out okay,
It’s knowing that even if it does not turn out okay,
It will still be okay because I AM and because We are

For as the Hebrew children knew,
Our God is able to deliver us from anything,
But if not,
Let Him be known to us anyway,
For they were not saved from going into the fire,
And yet what they found therein was worth more than all the gold on the idol
To whom they refused to bow,
And the joy found in the agony is worth more than all the idolatrous “joy”
That only shows a small portion of all that Yahweh really is.

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