A Little Book on Joy

Some months back I began writing "A Little Book on Joy." Should I finish it?

Blessings, Matt H

1. Joy’s Perspective

For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing. Isaiah 55:12 (KJV)

One secret of “Living a good news life in a bad news world” is in some large measure a matter of perspective somewhere between “head in the clouds” and “feet in the mud.”

The dull voice abruptly broke the monotony of a monotonous flight. We would soon encounter the chaotic bustle of the Nairobi airport. I had lost track of time since leaving Johannesburg. But instead of the usual droning (“We’ll be at our destination three hours late etc., etc.; Sorry for the inconvenience, etc., etc., so just sit back, relax etc., etc., and enjoy the remainder of this interminable flight in this rickety pile of riveted aluminum…”) the pilot surprised us all. “Folks I’m going to dip the right wing of the aircraft so you can enjoy a rare sight.” As the plane listed I was surprised then immediately mesmerized by joy at one of the most spectacular sites I’ve ever behold. It was like a white ice mountain in a sea of billowing cotton. There some 20,000 feet below, was the enormous snow covered crater of Mount Kilimanjaro. It was miles wide, glistening and piercing majestically and proudly through a thick blanket of East African cloud cover. I felt dwarfed by it’s shear grandeur, even thousands of feet overhead. Would I ever see such a spectacular site again in my life?

A year or two later the sun shone bright across the Savanna on the road from Nairobi to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast. The first half of the drive is a rare Kenyan pleasure. The road is in quite good repair. The roads overall are so bad in Kenya they joke that “only the drunks drive straight.” The windows were all down, keeping the temperature in the vehicle at a low slow sweat. The odd baboon attracted our faint and quaint attention. As I tried to doze my head bounced to the right. I half-opened my eyes and scanned the horizon to the south. I had never seen it from the ground but recognized the mountain immediately. I bolted upright, surprised by the shear joy of the spectacle. Rising alone on the horizon, not a cloud in the sky, there it was again, Kilimanjaro! And what a surprise! “For ye shall go out with joy… the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing.” I had no idea we’d see it on this trip. We must have been fifty miles north of the mountain. The breadth is overwhelming. It bothers the Kenyans to this day that Queen Victoria should have had the audacity to “give” what was not hers to her relative, the German Kaiser, thus forever favoring Tanzania and denying Kenya of her greatest natural wonder.

On the return we decided to drive deep into and through Masai country to trek up the mountain itself. Visibility was considerably lessened by a low pressure system. We hoped the clouds would clear, but it was not to be so. One of the grandest peaks in the world would not reveal herself. I had seen her greatest majesty, her gleaming white crater, without even intending to do so. Inspection with out expectation. I had beheld her grandeur from foothill to highest snow covered crag, quite without any merit or worthiness in me. Now I desired to see her up close, and for the first time had actually acted to do so. But she lay impenetrably hidden. We drove onward as the plain ascended. We trekked onto the very mountain itself, only to be thwarted. The clouds lay low and heavy all about, spitting rain at us intermittently as if laughing us to scorn. All I remember is the dirt road, the rain and mud, and thick forest and rickety villages. As darkness loomed the end of the day beckoned north. I was disappointed, yes… but I’d been on the mountain itself. And because I had beheld the mountain in its starkest beauty, the rain dampened but hardly snuffed out my smoldering joy. I was “singing” non-the-less.

So it is with joy, at least joy as a gift of the Spirit. There’s no forcing it, no coercing it, no measuring it, no cooking it up. Whenever that happens, joy quickly is faked and feigned and in fact, extinguished. “One should be warned to push aside reason and heresy because they always want to count and measure things.” (Luther, Festival Sermons I.137) There’s no calculating when and precisely how it shall strike or when it will be felt and to what extent. I am certainly not going to offer the reader anything like a “joy-O-meter” in this little book, or “Ten Sure Fire Ways to Put Joy Into Your Life.” Nonetheless, where there is Jesus there is joy, and a lot of it in the Bible. There is joy in the most profound truth of God’s word (the gospel of Christ) and the simplest grandeur of the tiniest particle of creation. But joy at its best is like the kingdom of God, it “comes indeed without our prayer, of itself.”

We ourselves have no constant or even enduring view from, or into the heavens in this life. But we are given a fabulous glimpse into heaven itself in the bible. When the clouds break and the heavenly rays reveal the peaks, we behold joy. And there is an attitude of joy in life which can and does encompass it all, even in the face of severe trial or death. “Even Job on his dunghill was not deserted by the Lord.” Ambrose (ACCS VI.296) In fact, there is a kind of joy so profound, so enduring, that it can only be known and felt in one way. Its weaker shadows must be completely dashed and lost. Here’s the secret: If we seek joy for its own sake we will not find it. If we seek Jesus we shall be engulfed and inundated by it, and quite by surprise.

The bible is a book about Jesus, more than that, the bible actually delivers Jesus to us in divine words which are “living and mighty and active, sharper than any two edge sword.” It is more than possible for us to “Live a Good News Life in a Bad News World,” it’s God’s great pleasure and desire for us to do so. But if it is to be a life which knows true joy, it shall be joy in perspective. The bible occasionally “dips a wing” for us, and we see beams of beatific-heavenly joy, something like seeing Kilimanjaro from 20,000 feet. Once in a while we’ll get the picture of the whole, or as much of the whole as can be seen at once from earth. But most of the time we’ll view life from the perspective of a trek in the mud, or as ants atop a “dunghill.” By faith we know the mountain’s there, and by the same faith we may share its joy.

More than anything, I’d like this little book to be a bit of “joy in the mud” for the reader, a little book on the perspectives of joy I have found along the way, much to my great surprise and delight, muddy feet and all.