Count It All Joy
Count It All Joy?
What sense does such a word make? "Count it nothing but joy when you fall into trials of many different kinds." How can I feel joy when the pain is wrenching my back teeth loose? How can I call it joy when her death is ripping away my lungs and I choke even to get a breath? Why should I pretend to feel joyful when the depression is bone-deep and unceasing and my joy-meter is wrecked?
And did Jesus grin every moment? Can we look in on and listen to the sounds of Gethsemane with its audible sobbing and agonised begging and think he counted it nothing but pure joy? And if he didn't think it was pure joy how can we, and why should we be called to it?
Maybe the passage in James assumes things to be true that it doesn't spell out. Yes, that's probably it and our everyday experience will probably bear that out. Take the case of a mother who's delivering her baby and is at that level experiencing pure pain. If we asked her if that isolated aspect of the whole enterprise was pure joy or pure pain she'd tell you she'd rather be eating ice cream. But she would insist that you can't isolate that pain and ignore its immediate connection and benefit to the whole joyous enterprise of giving her baby life and freedom and greater potential for life. At one level it's all pain but when it's taken as a part of a more wondrous objective it is pain gladly chosen and endured.
Christ's Gethsemane experience has the same sort of structure. Down below the obvious pain and distress and down below the desire to avoid the loss, if possible, there was the deeper desire to do the Holy Father's will. The joy he found in pleasing his Holy Father is seen in all he takes on and it is this he has his eyes on even in the garden.
When Paul fervently and repeatedly asked the Lord to remove the thorn it's clear he didn't find the agony a joyful thing. But down below the desire to be free from the enduring pain was a deeper desire and that was to be God's faithful servant. He looked at the pain-bringing thorn from that deeper perspective and found to his glad surprise that it deepened his capacity for true service. It was in the light of his deeper convictions and dreams and purposes that he looked joyfully on his agony. The agony in and of itself was nothing to be joyful over but then such things don't exist in and of themselves.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.