The Joy That Was


Dear Eugene,

Joy is a choice.

Joy is a choice made necessary by sorrow and fear of often greater necessity.

"Work is work," we say.  A burden happens to us as we happen to live up to some expectations that happen to be needfully this and necessarily that.  "It is what it is."  "What can you do about it?"

A take-out office lunch followed by a customized bubble-tea, a favorite TV show to wind down a day, a dream vacation, a marriage vow bombastically made, decisions we choose to "enjoy" ourselves fill the cracks of a life with a built-in trajectory laden with assumptions rampant and fateful.  Imagine to have all our "necessary" burdens taken away and ourselves placed in the middle of an empty room, stripped down to our bare essence; would joy be there to accompany our nakedness?  What wasn't there before wouldn't magically show up after.

True joy caulks no crack and paints over no surface.  It permeates and transforms and takes over.

Today while helping out with craft at a care center, I witnessed a bizarre medical condition happened upon a participant, one that would make a rather resounding statement about a person's helplessness whoever the happened-upon person is.  I wouldn't know how to speak about myself if I were her.  She was sitting on my right.  The happening was technicolor real to me.

What came out of her mouth after, though, were words of gratitude and grace: one statement, firm and specific, then two, soft and thoughtful, then three, more of the same angelic dialect distinctly pleasing to God.

Do I need to tell you the obvious, that this has always been how she talks before the bizarrely necessary happening?

Yours, Alex

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