Nehemiah 8:10 “The joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Circumstances in our lives often dictate that we lose our joy. I feel it myself today as I write this. Protracted problems with no apparent end in sight suffocate my soul. Yet I recognize that half the issue is focusing on myself and my problems rather than on God and his multiple grace gifts in my life. He is our strength and our shield, and his joy is my strength.
George Bernard Shaw had a taste of joy in his life. He described it as follows:
“This is the true joy in life — the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got ahold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
That certainly stirs me out of any temptation towards self-pity! Only in the last few decades has it become commonplace for people to live with a sense of entitlement to happiness, the result of which is a large number of people behaving like ‘feverish, selfish little clods of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making them happy’. Rather may we be a ‘force of nature’ bearing ‘a splendid torch’, and making it ‘burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations’!
Lord, I choose an attitude of gratitude and joy today. Amen!
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