How Can You Experience Joy?

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23 NIV)

Every January, I choose a word for the year. Sometimes it comes to me quickly, and other times I struggle to find it. Once I decide on the word, I carry it into the new year with confidence and vision, excited to shape the months ahead with it. Last year I chose wholehearted, the year before was freedom, and this year is joy.

Joy appears eighty-eight times in the Old Testament, and fifty-seven times in the New Testament. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit, and the book of Nehemiah tells us that the joy of the Lord is our strength. Because it is a characteristic of God and a fruit of the Spirit, we can have confidence knowing that God means for us all to experience joy.

Despite this, I have spent a large portion of my life wondering if I would ever regularly experience joy. It has been one of the most challenging practices for me to grasp and live out. I figured the trauma and grief I had experienced kept me disconnected from it, and I had all but given up on the idea that I would ever know joy.

I’ve learned that many of us confuse happiness with joy. The media sells the idea that happiness is the ultimate goal in life, and they always prescribed consumption to attain it. There’s a reason people head to Amazon when they’re feeling sad. We are told that happiness comes when we reach certain milestones, gather the right stuff, or experience things like parenthood, marriage, and homeownership. Instead of joy, many of us are pursuing a feeling based on circumstances. As a result, we can feel trapped in a perpetual cycle of dissatisfaction.

In my pursuit of happiness, I avoided pain, discomfort, grief, and anything else I perceived as a threat. Psychologists say that the degree to which we allow ourselves to experience pain and grief is the degree to which we will be able to experience joy. In other words, the things we do to avoid feeling pain also prevent us from feeling joy. I spent a lot of my life creating barriers to joy by running from these things.

I learned this firsthand when my brother died.

When I was twenty-four, my brother died in a four-wheeling accident. The following months were a haze of grief and agony. Eventually, the pain lessened, but so did the joy. I didn’t realize what was happening at the time, but looking back, I can see how the coping mechanisms I put in place, while numbing me from the pain, were also numbing me from experiencing joy. At some point, I heard a message on the beatitudes and how God promises to comfort those who mourn. After that message, I decided I wanted to take a chance on God’s promise, so I allowed myself to revisit my grief and in so doing, gave it to God. As a result, I experienced healing that opened me to joy.

My greatest lessons on joy have come from the most surprising places. As I have pressed into difficulty, unpacked my trauma, and learned to hold space for the grief of others, I have started to experience more joy. Several years ago, I felt a call on my life to move into racial reconciliation and anti-racism work. When I started learning about the injustice and pain many people experience, I pressed into the discomfort instead of running away from it. I decided to trust God to meet me in the difficulty of the work because he had done it before. While the work is hard and painful, I have experienced some of the most profound connection and joy. It’s not lost on me that I wouldn’t have stepped into this work if I was ruled by a desire to keep the face of happiness over everything else.

When I began to put sitting with others in their pain as a priority over feeling less stress in my own life, I started to experience joy. When I said no to my comfort and yes to listening to others, I experienced joy. When I said no to my comfort and yes to the invitation God had placed before me, I experienced joy.

I didn’t understand it in the beginning, but it makes sense to me now. I spent so much of my life fearing the broken places and worrying that pressing into those spaces would steal my happiness. I felt buried under the weight of my grief, and I didn’t think I had the emotional energy or bandwidth to reach out to anyone else in their grief. But I’ve discovered that it’s the exact opposite. I’ve found that pressing in and feeling is what allows God to meet me and move me toward healing. I’ve found that joy is where God is, and God is in the broken places.

God is sitting with the broken-hearted, comforting the grieving, visiting the imprisoned, and advocating for those in the margins. All of my attempts to pursue happiness and run from the pain and difficulty of this life is precisely what kept me from experiencing the fullness and magnitude of the joy that comes from being more fully present in this life as God created me to be.

How is God calling you into the brokenness of today and therefore, toward joy? How can you be fully present in a time when we are experiencing great loss around the globe and are commanded to live as separately as we can? What kind of work might God be asking you to do that, while possibly painful, can lead to greater joy? This might be as simple as engaging the news every day and praying for those who are in crisis, reaching out to neighbors from a distance, supporting local businesses whose livelihoods are threatened, or caring for ill loved ones. Follow his leading, and you may be surprised to also find joy.

Jen Kinney is a writer and anti-trafficking activist. Her twin sons and passion for social justice make her a prime candidate for therapy. Humor and sarcasm fuel her, along with copious amounts of coffee. You can find her writings at The Mighty, HuffPost and her blog jenkinney.com.

Photograph © Aditya Saxena, used with permission