Day 3545 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

James 1:2 NIV

To consider is to choose the choice that contemplates, that evaluates, that negotiates the particulars and peculiarities of something be it a situation, circumstance, confusion or contention, seeking inside such considering the good that’s there to be found despite the bad always biting for our attention.

And thus for us to consider it pure joy to face trials of many kinds is to set our minds to find the good within even what we want to believe only bad. It’s to make the conscious effort to evoke joy from within a heart perhaps jaded or complacent or fearful or failing as it falls most often in that regard toward that most negative of direction. To consider joy is to choose joy, to pursue joy, to make joy our outcome, the only of which we’re in any way willing to welcome, to want, to win. Yes, to choose joy is to deny all that isn’t conducive to such a stance as happiness.

Alas, it’s perhaps too a choice we’ve scantly known thus far in life.

For what is joy? What is it to be jovial? What is the mind of jester of such joyful joviality that they just jump for joy at the break of even the most mundane of morn? What might it be to be so free as to venture beyond what is just plain ol' happy? What is joy? Where is joy? Who knows joy and does joy know anyone?

What is joy?

Well, joy is defined by the reliable Merriam and Webster as “the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires”. Further it’s a delight, “ the expression or exhibition of such emotion as gaiety or happiness or felicity”. It’s bliss, a source or cause of delight, an experiencing of great pleasure. Such is joy. It’s happiness in its fullest of form, an emotional excursion past the boundaries and barricades built to betray such an elation within this world and these wanton ways in which we walk always mostly away from joy toward hate and hassle and hustling to hate even more.

For here we’ve considered a great many things to hate, things we dislike, things we disbelieve are so clearly decisions we’ve made ourselves believe we should make or distress to see others choose for themselves within this way of life in which we all just lose and love it for some reason. Indeed, seems anymore that most days we find more reason to jeer than joy, more which us cry in pain rather than out in praise. Yes, we’re a people who seem to prefer pain and seek it thus inside every way and every place in which we might force it found.

For such is the stance of a victim, ours being a victim of being born, something all of us have thought ourselves a time or two. If we’re to be honest, that is.

Yes, I sadly must say that it seems our preference for pity has left us empty in terms of joy, let alone it pure. Because truth is that I dare say that we've all felt at least the outermost boundaries of such a bountiful beauty as to be joyous. I indeed imagine that most of us have ventured near this extremity of life's opportunity, this frightless frequency which is offered unto us all perhaps far more frequently than we’ve thought it found or felt it thought.

For again, it seems we’ve at least the ability to still hope for joy despite the odds given to most days of it being found being less than the finding of fear or folly in its stead instead. And so this makes me think that we know joy is there, and yet if so, why do we so tarry? Why do we give way to worry? Why live as if joy is something too hard to choose, not worth what it asks we lose?

Is joy truly unworthy of the loss of such things as hostility, immorality, immodesty, dishonesty, vanity even? For it does seem as if those are all considered traits or trophies we’re as equally unwilling to taint or tarnish as is this idea of pure joy to which we’re here called.

For alas, most days in life find us much unchanged, unchallenged is why. Because we’ve become a people settled into what’s considered acceptable. But maybe that’s the problem. Who’s considering it acceptable to live this way? Who gets to decide what we decide upon within our own lives? Who determined the lists of things which bring joy as split apart from the more which most think keep it away? Who was given such a power in our perspective as to define for us where joy is and where all it isn’t?

Because again, I think, no, in fact I know we’ve all felt at least the hint of joy at times in life. Because again, despite the struggles we’ve seen, it seems we’ve at least retained the ability to believe joy a possibility.

But if so, as I do indeed suppose, why is it that we spend so many days living as if we can't find our way back? Why do most days find us more forlorn than flying? Why've we, when have we so become these who be but a begrudged curmudgeon all but burdened by life? Is such a decided discontentment anything close to joy? Is our daily dishevelment at the hands of hardship or difficulty truly privy to such a stealing of our choice to consider it all joy? Are the momentary problems we face of such exorbitant trial and turmoil that they in turn absorb our ability to remember joy a choice we could, even in moments of struggle or strife, still choose for our life?

What is joy? Further still, what is pure joy, joy purified? What is purity, other than a lost curiosity? What is it to be pure, to be taintless, to be untarnished by such triviality as what's become normality? Why do we agree to such soiled normalcy when there is a purity for which to reach? A pure joy, perhaps? What is pure joy?

Well, what is pure? Again, looking at Merriam and Webster’s say on the matter, for something to be pure is to be “unmixed with any other matter”, free from dust, dirt, tarnish, taint or tatter, pure spring water. It’s something “spotless, stainless, free from harshness or roughness and being in tune” with what is true. Something pure is “characterized by no appreciable alteration of articulation during utterance”, something said, sought, seen or even assumed “being thus and no other”.

Thus to be pure is to be “free from what vitiates, violates, weakens, or pollutes”, a matter or material “containing nothing that does not properly belong”. In what is a far more faith-centered consideration, to be pure is to be “free from moral fault or guilt”, to be “marked by chastity or continent.”

And thus purity is a state of utter solidity, something so unwavering that it’s indeed unwilling to even wonder as to what it is to waver that it’s not even found a matter negotiable.

And thus, well, it seems that pure joy is a choice, and even further, one made without leaving room for other possibilities or outcomes.

Indeed, pure joy, it's a choice chosen by those choosing to not keep on losing to the lighter side of a lost life. It's the choosing to keep pursuing what perhaps most find pitiable and pathetic. It's perhaps something best begotten by mere children. For truth holds that they're the last who seem so able to laugh, to love, to look ahead and see the hope that to adults is anymore hidden beyond the hardships and behind the hatred of them that we see instead from up here inside a responsibility so selfish that we fear the widely assumed rather than the worth of what’s ours alone to choose.

Alas, we’ve seemingly all but forgotten that there are some such matters in life that ask we be the only ones who decide upon them. And while this has made for a rather comfortable communal outlook on all but most of life, unfortunately it’s also cost us such things as our now somehow agreeing upon the popularly perceived worthlessness of joyousness. Yes, we've not the time to be happy, to be lighthearted, to be left to our own thoughts as we fight to wrangle them free from a world that's bound them to all that isn't us nor where or who we've the hope to be.

No, we've too much to worry about, too much to win, too much to wrong. And thus we know not anymore neither joy nor it pure. All we know in what might be perceived as purity is hesitancy to be happy, fear of fatality, the overall misunderstood mundanity of our mortality, indeed the widely-perceived mundanity of even morality. They're all burdens that've only become burdens by our believing never beyond a chuckle to where that choice to chase joy continues.

For indeed, the sad state of our fallen reality seems only fit to find that the furthest of this joyful freedom we feel unafraid to find is found within the fleeting feeling of some food we like or a joke that brings about a laugh for a moment.

But that's it, and because that’s become all we seem willing to know of it, well, that's where the children have it.

For they know nothing of life's gravity, only the grace. They're otherwise unworried of all that's worldly, just want to run wild and feel the wind carry their arms as if wings of wonder ready to wander beyond the hither in what is a belief unburdened by what’s always been but an in between. Indeed, the smallest of us in both stature and age are the ones who've waged the way to win at what is joy perfected, joy purified. For they just live life, unafraid to die, unaware of what it even means to.

And perhaps that's the secret we've all long since forgotten.

Perhaps pure joy is proven within our living as if death is but a day as cast amongst the rest in which life is lived both here and forever. Yes, I might in fact become convinced of that, and too that we'd all know far more joy were we to not know what we've come to think of either life's meaning or death's being the ending of it. Because it seems that within the presence of fear is joy not found. The weight of worry ties joy to this ground and asks it never wonder higher than here. The want of the world revolves a joy dissolved into the doubt of a life determined by our fear of losing it, as if we can lose what we didn't find for ourselves.

Indeed, why is this a fear, and why is it so clearly preferred to what is joy pure?

For here we know far more fear than faith, and thus more of what it is to be jaded than joyous. All because we think we can lose what we didn't earn, have taken what was always God-given, forfeit what we never found or find for ourselves a failure to live beyond this ground where we sadly think joy is waiting to be found by eyes that can only seem to see the slightest resemblance of it on only cloudless days and calm seas rolling gently upon quiet cays.

Why do we so agree? Especially when it just keeps us so unhappy? Is joy truly only there to choose when life is easy and we’ve nothing to lose? Is joy not still the same choice when we’ve lost it all and find then that we needed none of it after all? For the fact of our faith is that we've all been called to a pure joy, a joy so joyous that it enjoys the challenge, the chase, the choice to face all that comes our way and see within it all no difference between trial and triumph.

And that’s my challenge for us all starting today. That maybe we can learn this mindset, this perspective that prefers to pretend that there is nothing different between promise and pain, loss and gain, especially in a world that we should know isn’t our home and thus not one with the right to define some manmade misunderstanding of some imaginary difference between hardship and hope.

After all, as we've of late talked, all comes from Him and thus has a purpose. What if we could learn the humility, the hope, the happiness to see that if it's His purpose, that too then it's joy perfect? What if we could be as happy in the rain as in the day of skies plain? What if we could see the life in the loss and gain in the pain? What if we could want for what He knows makes us best? What if we could want not of all the rest?

Yes, might we there and then find joy? Might it be pure? Might we dare decide to find out?

That is my prayer in what is a new day given as another gift despite whatever we may like or despise of whatever it still has to bring across our bow of either doubt or dare. Yes, what if we dare to decide other than doubt, again, may we only there find out what is joy and just how pure it can be?

Let us just, for I say pure joy is perfectly worth it. But the solemn fact is that this we'll never know if never we go to where joy awaits. And to this we'll just never agree so long as only see that joy isn't worth the journey as it jaunts through taunts and trials as if trophies and triumphs. Yes, let us forget the difference between hardship and happiness, for perhaps when they're allowed to be the same, maybe only then can we see that life ain't quite so heavy, and thus then is neither joy so near as empty as we've long lived like it to be.

No, joy is anything but empty, and in true reality, it is too only pure and thus forever free from such triviality as this forsaken trophy we’ve made of our hesitancy toward it.

Indeed, I dare say it's something worth fighting for, dying toward. After all, Jesus calls us unto a childlike faith as He leads still the way to the cross, through the grave, to the shore of where joy is stored. Find the courage to take that trip my friends.

For who knows what all pure joy we'll find when we're finally unafraid to look at the beauty of the journey as opposed to the roughness of the ride?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold