Joy as a process…..joy as a goal. A strange thought at first it seems. How frustrating it is to have to work on something that one hopes life just naturally allows them. Shouldn’t a sunset over Yosemite or lunch on the Seine provide enough of a temporal experience that our joy would be miraculously formulated and ingrained into our future beings. Should not joy be found in abundance in this land of ours where everything is to be had? Surely not for only through grace can one find true joy. And then again the thought hit me recently that there is a difference between joy and simplicity. And we should not mistake one for the other. As already mentioned joy is a pursuit, a goal that God calls us to pursue and express as a means to missions and Gods glorification. Seeking joy requires all of the spiritual disciplines including learning and application of our cognitive gifts. It is a as a person once said that we are to have the head of an adult and the heart of a child. A person who practices simplicity disregards the call to wisdom and learning or just sees no need in it and follows a path that leads to a child’s head and heart. To many they view the simple one as full of joy in that they are always the optimist and silver-lining everything. But I think we have to to be careful when we seek a role-model in the pursuit of joy. It isn’t Pollyanna we need; it is the person with quiet enthusiasm. The person who avoids the storms and speaks praises that such a beautiful event could exist, that is the example we need.

I say friend remember this then, and never let go of the thoughts that float about you. A great sleeping behemoth lays near. As it sleeps in terrific peace we are beckoned on. For potential is collateral only in kinetic form and a holding out of the word of life can be seen as a grasping. With his mighty form he could quell such riotous demons who would rob joy and again rob the rejoicers. Armed and awakened how great would his wrath be, or would he quietly climb the hill once again? A crown in his grasp if only he would take it, the grumbling of the enemies and legalists seem to lead astray even those who have given so much already. Restless at the onset of yet another quiet dusk, would he have that we work out an assurance that would be so easily proved if our vanity of vision would be fed. How easy it would be to call him asleep as the land revels about him, but hope springs as even the dark guard around him find hope in his form. So here on this high spot you would have us be a glaring beacon to the universe, and even at the end of the feeble light we manage I can see you there. Prone but ready, silent yet everywhere, awful yet steeped in comfort.

It is a great memory, a great day, when one finally lets go of that Western myth of individualistic ruggedness and once again returns their focus to where it belongs. For the teleos on Him, for the temporal on your neighbor. How miserable I could become when I left civilization for a time and withdrew into the shadows and shapes of my own mind, a percent of what I was and convinced that I truly was being "defensive". I had the idea that my actions were a necessary maneuver to heal myself from within, and to follow the obvious course since noone in this place cared for what I was doing anyways. How true are those who say that doing a good deed for others is the fastest path out of self-penalized indwelling. And this all feeds into my conclusion that one, that me, are created to live for others and most excellently to live for our Creator. Its something you can't rationalize outside of cutting corners, and can't prove with the implements of science. Faith and belief are sticky like that.

Drastic measures had to be taken to ensure sanity and lucid process. To bake on the coals of constant intrigue and lingering failure, or find a more perfect peace and lay to rest a roaring pride. This was the state of one prone to wander and Lord how I feared it. You see fear had been abonded upon takeoff on this junket but doubt lay just beyond every corner. Did I make a mistake? Could God send me so far to learn to listen to Him the next time? What a dishonorable student I must have been, must be. Was that man right in his seething mendacity? Were his caustic words the problem or the truth that lingered from their use? Imagine my freinds a time when I was called an emotionalist! How terrible it sounded to me. How greatly I wanted to spring back with a well prepared arsenal of spears(the ones you sharpen to readiness but hope you never find use for). But this one refused the bait and left with at least a sense of dignity, knowing that the adversary wanted my rage to spew forth to grant him the ultimate power to banish me back to a place I knew not anymore and from a place that clamored for what I could give. So I left the furnace and into an even hotter evening thick with thoughts and avenues that were even then beckoning me to act on. If it was not for a more steady hand of a trusted freind who knows what lengths of retribution I would have unleashed to end my days with a brilliant stand. But as the days after the battle passed along a chilling standoff arrived to torture an already unbearable situation. And this is where escape became necessary, where a drastic move became vogue. And as I left those white gates one last time and turned to the north I left my life for the past one and a half years, my anger and hurt, and my self-pride. I carried with me a hope and desire to make right and a deep felt hurt that I could have failed so badly and been wronged so consistently. And in those next months joy was mine.
Now here is the trick everyone.....how does one cling to such a hard fought and learned lesson? Lord I pray for that these ideals and lessons would never be far from my weeping yet hopeful heart.

Pride- Lewis called it the "Great Sin", a cancer of the soul that severs love for God and gives rise to the other maladies that stalk us. How dangerous is must be then when one takes the focus/spotlight off of its intended star (Him) and onto the aspiring malcontent (me). How powerful we feel when we aggrandize ourselves to the loss of our brothers, how perfectly corrupted we can become when our youthful vanity is the catalyst of a more mature and cunning pride. Such a simple word, such a simple ploy, such a drastict fall.

Alas and did my heart bleed, that night, that day when hope bloomed nevermore. And wrought in a flash of inner goodness and pomp did my soul find no refuge again. A fire, yes a bright one did once burn away the unmistakable fear of one chained by the outer motif of miscalculation.
A stream back in the hills betraying everything on its meandering path to confluent bliss was I. And rolled away was the fledgling passion of a life lived for worth but for such a time as this crushed.
And she said time can present healing to grievous words shouted into the blasted wind. And this is once more a period of day, a stretch of purifying sun, and hope blooms again, but far from this winters shore.

Blessings

J

Today is the 3rd of July, and I celebrate. But if awake to a morn tommorow where I find no joy in this land will I be any less a patriot? In our bloated self-assurance that we rest upon here we should celebrrate our hookup everyday. "Thank you God for giving us this land where a person can be anything they want, get anything they want, and fall faster than anywhere else". One need only gaze over our southern border and realize that this utopia has distinct borders, that this dream has limitations, and sadly throwing money at this one wont bring relief. And when one realizes that their 401K could buy a small country, that they drive the same car used by the president of Bostwana, that their excess comes off the backs of the oppressed, maybe then change will come. But not a change that trickles or is force-fed, but a change that begins with the soul and ends with a prize that never stops giving. A lost cause? Possibly.....I will just pray and keep saving up for that new video game system...you know the one that I have to have.

A fire a veriatable fire. That is what one wants when faced with mealancholy and grimy repitition. Day after day the tension grows, the queue lengthens and life gets easier as your soul goes south. A this for a that, a fall in the stead of an eternal spring. Parched soul masked by a deluged earth. And then to realize your station and to scream out to the Hearer your disdain and disgust at your deafness and ignorance. Bridges burnt are too often quickly spurned. When will that "this time" or "nevermore" find fertile soil and make an endrun past our own limitations and reservations, fear and anxities, gouging and withholding? A test you say, a test I know, but how quick the mind jettisons the epiphany of today for the lure of the leg.