Gratitude and Joy Even Now

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers and welcome to our ongoing search to find and cultivate joy even in the most challenging of times. We want to continue our encouragement for showing genuine love and compassion to others despite the conflicting/competing social, political, economic, and spiritual positions and the associated heated rhetoric.

Often over the course of writing our blog I/we have expressed our gratefulness for God’s love, mercy, and grace shown us since the accident. To date, much of that gratefulness revolved around Joy’s physical and cognitive healing and recovery. Being grateful for Joy’s life after she literally knocked on death’s door, her only early memory being called, by the voice of God, out of the “hole” she felt she was going into to die. Grateful for the initial physical gains in her ICU and LTAC inpatient stays, grateful for the graciousness of so many of you that allowed us the MedFlight needed to return to Minnesota, grateful for her exceptional inpatient therapy progress, the wonderful gift of being able to return home together, and then more miraculous gains in Joy’s months of outpatient therapy.

While we still cannot even put into words our gratefulness for God’s provision and sufficiency over the past 23 months, this week I felt deeply moved that I was neglecting to look at all the ways I could be grateful even in theses challenging times. It was like I needed to open a shade on a window I’d been ignoring and when I did, I saw so many more opportunities for gratefulness beyond Joy's healing path. Watching Joy’s “joyful” work on her creations for Bundles of Love, her expanding social network, our new home, the support of likeminded friends, our compassionate church family, the love and safety of our children and grandchildren, these and many other things filled my mind.

One particularly precious moment for which I am so grateful occurred when Joy returned from a baby shower our community hosted for the young Hispanic woman who keeps our hallways, common areas, and elevators shining and sparkling. She’s having a baby girl in February and so Joy, joyfully, knitted a beautiful pink sweater, hat, booties, and mitten set for her. This young woman also received many other gifts which excited and warmed Joy's heart. But what touched me the most, was when Joy came back from the shower, while she was very pleased with how it went, she then got tears in her eyes and said, “maybe I should try and learn Spanish, so that I could speak to her and others who are being treated so badly right now.” Joy is so selfless, that despite her ongoing deficits, her heart leaps at the opportunity to serve and bless someone else. I would have to say that I am not only grateful, but mega-grateful for my blessed Joy and her very big heart. 🥰

But as we often express our wish to keep the focus of this blog on looking for and cultivating joy in all circumstances, where does gratefulness fit in? I’m so glad you asked…

I have always appreciated Brené Brown’s work and especially her research correlating gratitude and joy, she writes:

One of the most profound changes in my life happened when I got my head around the relationship between gratitude and joy. I always thought that joyful people were grateful people. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? They have all of that goodness to be grateful for. But after spending countless hours collecting stories about joy and gratitude, three powerful patterns emerged: Without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful, actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. Both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual practices that were bound to a belief in human interconnectedness and a power greater than us. People were quick to point out the differences between happiness and joy as the difference between a human emotion that’s connected to circumstances and a spiritual way of engaging with the world that’s connected to practicing gratitude… Gratitude is a powerful catalyst for joy, resilience, and healing.

But Brené Brown isn’t the only one to explore the coexistence of gratitude and joy. Henri Nouwen writes:

Gratitude in its deepest sense means to live life as a gift to be received thankfully. And true gratitude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy. We do this because we become aware of God’s life, God’s presence in the middle of all that happens.

If mourning and dancing are part of the same movement of grace, we can be grateful for every moment we have lived. We can claim our unique journey as God’s way to mold our hearts to greater conformity to Christ. The cross, the primary symbol of our faith, invites us to see grace where there is pain; to see resurrection where there is death. The call to be grateful is a call to trust that every moment can be claimed as the way of the cross that leads to new life. When Jesus spoke to his disciples before his death and offered them his body and blood as gifts of life, he shared with them everything he had lived—his joy as well as his pain, his suffering as well as his glory—and enabled them to move into their own mission in deep gratitude. Day by day we find new reasons to believe that nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ.

These are very trying times and while I am not grateful for the cruelty, pain, stress, or uncertainty faced by many, I am thankful that there are those who are willing to speak and encourage us in some of the darkest times of life and history. One of those individuals was Martin Luther King, Jr whose life we honored this past Monday. Two of his quotes have been especially meaningful to me during this challenging time.

“Use me, God. Show me how to take who I am, who I want to be, and what I can do, and use it for a purpose greater than myself.”

And…

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

Finally, please know that we are oh so grateful for anyone and everyone who stops by to explore our story, it is an honor to share it, thank you so much for your precious time and attention.