When Joy Catches You by Surprise (Psalm 100)

We can experience joy at many times and in many different ways, but often it sneaks up on us when we weren’t quite expecting it. Joy isn’t something we conjure up, hoping if we can just figure out how to escape our sadness, change our situation, or figure out an easier way forward, then we’ll finally grasp joy.   The key to joy is knowing God.  It’s a deep, fundamental acknowledgement that God is God and I am not, which opens the door to seeing with a different perspective.  It quiets my demands that God do things my way.  And it opens the door for us to look for God, to see God with us, in the midst of difficulty and suffering, instead of putting our whole focus on looking for the way out.  Perhaps so much so that we miss God in the midst of our circumstance.   In order to really truly experience deep joy, we need to be willing to feel all the other things that we also feel, and to bring them to God.  When we numb ourselves to feeling sadness or grief, we also numb ourselves to experiencing joy.