Taking the joy out of joyful

I've been stewing about this for a while, but I recently saw it again, so here we are. What has got my pants in a knot? It's actually a meme, and admittedly, it is a little over the top to get upset over a meme. I can completely overlook memes designed to be sarcastic or purposefully infuriating. That's kind of their point, and I'm happy to scroll on past. It's the memes that purport to communicate some great truth but instead end up misleading people that make me a little upset. 

What is it about this time? I don't have the actual text in front of me, but it is something along the lines of "The greatest danger to Christians is the idea that they should do things which make them happy." It goes on, but I don't remember the exact words; the sentiment is that being happy distracts us from doing God's work. 

Boy do we Christians do a good job of taking the joy out of joyfulness.

And yes, I purposefully replaced "happy" with "joy". If Bible translators can do it, so can I. Figuring out exactly what the idea of joy is has been a years-long project for me. We had come out of what felt like a pretty joyless season. Well, not only joyless but so filled with anxiety and fear and worry and stress that my body felt as though it could never actually relax. Those were the years when I had panic attacks because of it all. When one's nervous system is so overloaded, it can take a long time to recalibrate. And right in the middle of that season, we added a major move which proved to be pretty unsettling all on its own. I was doing okay, but joy, happiness seemed still just a little out of reach. 

I decided to spend some time with my Bible and concordance looking up every mention of the word "joy" to see if I could figure it out. What was interesting was I was using an NIV concordance with an ESV translation. It turns out joy is a slippery word. It can be joy or mirth or gladness or happiness. It's almost as if the translators brought their thesauruses to work and made good use of them. 

Really, all this is to say that Christians like to split hairs about the difference between joyful and happy, but I think it is a false difference if one version of the Bible can use happy while another uses joyful. I think we English speakers just don't really know if there is a difference between the two and what that difference is... though we like to think we do. 

Even researchers into emotions have some difficulty with the two. As I was writing this, I paused and looked up joy and happiness in two different books. Books written by two people who work together, in fact. And their own definitions of each of these words is pretty much the opposite of each other. Go figure. The moral is I don't think we can make too strong a case for one and not the other. They are too slippery in meaning to pin down. 

Before we head back to the meme which started all of this, let's take one more little side trip, this time to the Westminster Catechism. (For those who don't know, a catechism is a series of questions and answers used to train new believers in their faith. The Westminster Catechism was written between 1657 and 1647 by English and Scottish theologians and laymen.) The first question of the catechism is: 

Q. What is the chief end of man? [I'm not going to tackle inclusive language at the moment, just replace man with whatever collective noun works for you. This is already going to be long enough.]

A. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

I have always loved this because it says God desires us to experience enjoyment. Joy. God is good and created good things. Finding joy and happiness while loving God and following Him are not mutually exclusive. Why do Christians like to say otherwise? 

I think it's the whole 'do hard things' idea. I'll admit I was really taken with this idea for a while. The trouble is that it implies that if we are not suffering, doing hard things, struggling, really showing God that we mean it, we aren't working hard enough. If we are happy then we need to up our suffering quotient a bit more. We aren't doing hard enough things. 

This is simply a nicely-packaged work mentality. I must do things to show God how much I love Him (and maybe show a lot of other people as well). And doing all these hard things is a heck of a lot of work. Since I've been there and done that, I feel pretty confident in asserting that. Why? Because I am the one doing the hard things. Not God. Me. I took that responsibility on myself. And it was hard. And it made me unhappy. And it made me anxious and fearful. And none of this was from God. 

Finally I reached the end of what I could manage and in despair, I handed it all over to God. I washed my hands of certain situations. I told Him it was all His. I couldn't do all these hard things anymore. 

It was after this act of giving up, of passing off responsibility, of not doing anything of substance, that I started to find joy and happiness creeping up on me. Nothing is too hard for God, it just took me finally deciding that God didn't actually need me to do anything and letting go of misplaced responsibility. 

If you were to look at my life from the outside, very little has changed from the hard season to the peaceful one. I know people look at my life and see me doing hard things for God. Sure, there can be difficult seasons —none of us escapes grief and sorrow — but actually what I am doing is not hard. It is not hard because I am doing what God designed me to do. Using one's skills and talents and gifts is a joyful and happy experience. I am doing things which make me happy. I see no danger whatsoever.

Jesus says His yoke is easy and His burden is light. He wants us to find that place where we find happiness in loving others or caring for His creation or seeking justice or working for peace. These are good things and doing these things can bring great joy and yes, happiness. Christians should actually be the happiest and least fearful among us because of the deep belief we have in a good God who loves us and takes care of us. Sadly, many seemed far more focused on catching other people doing wrong than spending the time loving them as God does.