Joy Examination

This past summer, I have very consciously recorded in my brain's notebook a particular feeling. You know that warm, effervescent feeling that bubbles up from the deep well of all the feels? I realized this feeling was on the endangered feelings list. And you're thinking, Oh for the love, Kendra. Get over yourself and your first world non-problems.

But I needed to keep this notebook in my brain so that I could. Get over myself.

The notebook log of joyful feels:

May

- Sitting in a park in Savannah and watching my kids play independently on the playground.

July

- Backfloating in the neighborhood pool on a weekend afternoon with hubs and kiddies - Walking at the Chattanooga Market, flanked by both my kiddies

The pattern I see is that joy is 100% more likely to occur when I am with my family. I like the odds of that.

*** I got contacts this past summer. I wear them and I like them but I am still adjusting to facing the world without my double-goggled barrier. There is a lot one can hide behind the Velma-inspired specs. You can hide tired better, you can masquerade as someone who is put together. I'm afraid of how naked my face is now, how it might betray me, let others see my joyless countenance.

*** The little boy with autism who likely wandered away from his grandparents' home and drowned in Lake Erie this past weekend had lived in my hometown. I was so heavy with the sads yesterday, thinking about his family and their loss and how hard autism is and how long the summer days can be with little children and yet we wouldn't trade them for all the world. Then, this evening, I drank in all the images of my hometown, where street after street, families placed luminaries up and down the sidewalk to send a little love and light out into the darkness of pain and grief and uncertainty.

Amazing how the heaviest sadness can be followed by the most noble acts of downright goodness.

***

I realized this past summer that joy comes at a tremendous cost in this world. It is expensive, and buying it at wholesale is not an option. It requires pacing through the aisles of great injustices and terrible-awfuls where we sometimes have to linger because of congestion. Joy is the item we fight for, and we would not want to purchase it with a coupon--the cheap stuff isn't long-lasting and will just leave us wanting more. Joy can be fleeting but it has taught me more about a God who loves us and wants us to experience it in endless supply.