Joy as Our Emotional Home Base
How a pretty great Pixar movie reminds us of the joy that God has for us -- and how we can recapture that joy when life is hard.
Yesterday our little family went to see the movie “Inside Out 2.” It was fabulous.
It was also highly likely that I was the only one with big ‘ol ugly tears spilling out of my eyes for the entire last 20 minutes. If you haven’t seen it, go. It’s about emotions and growing up. It’s about joy and anxiety and sadness and, really, about what it means to be human.
As an unhealthy Enneagram 7, I sharply protest against any emotion that does not live on the happier end of the emotional grid — love, happiness, gratitude, trust, hope, contentment, awe, and my favorite — joy!
This is the exact reason that these past two years have been so hard on me. Two years ago on this day, my incredible mom went to the emergency room with what we thought were gall bladder issues. A month to the day, she went to heaven after the doctors discovered bile duct cancer that had progressed too far, too fast. (You can read a bit more about this here.)
I have been forced to live on the more painful side of the emotional grid — daily struggling with anger, despair, apathy, disappointment, depression, and my least favorite — fatigue.
I have learned more about what it means to be human in these past two years than I have in 40-some years of life.
So as I sat in that movie theater and watched how the protagonist emotion Joy was trying to fight for her girl Riley as Riley was being overtaken by the antagonist emotion Anxiety, I wanted to scream. And then my tears came as Joy sat, deflated, and declared, “Maybe this is what happens when you grow up. You feel less joy.”
I think I visibly slapped my palm to my mouth in an effort to muffle my “NOOOOO!!!”
No one seemed to notice.
So I sat stewing and worrying for the next 15 minutes, wondering how things would turn out.
***
How many of us recall from our childhoods the levity and delight we felt as we belted out the lyrics, “I have the joy, joy, joy, joy, Down in my heart, (where?) Down in my heart, (where?) Down in my heart, I have the joy, joy, joy, joy, Down in my heart, (where?) Down in my heart to stay?" Rarely do we find a child not smiling as they wave their hands in the air and dance with full might to that song.
But look closer. This song, although emotionally powerful, is fueled by a somber reality for many of us: joy is down in our hearts — perhaps so far down and hidden that we have lost what it means to be joyful! It’s there, but maybe it’s buried by SO MANY OTHER EMOTIONS.
Before I go any further, I want to debunk the myth of what joy is. Many of us think of joy as an elated state. A dictionary definition tells us that joy is “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.” In the Bible, however, we find something a little bit different — something that looks a bit more like a peaceful, vibrant, and contented cheerfulness instead of a dance party.
When the disciple (and Jesus’s brother!) James says, “[c]onsider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds,” the Greek form of the word “joy” is closer to calm delight. (James 1:2)
Calm delight! In a world that disappoints us and crushes us, doesn’t calm delight seem way more attainable than a dance party?
For over a year after losing my mom, I could not burst forth with big praises of laughter and joy. It was a dark, suffocating time.
What I wish I would have known then that I know now is that joy isn’t just the dance party. Joy, I think, and what I see in the Bible, looks more like hopeful trust and contented cheerfulness than exuberant praise.
What I wish I would have known then that I know now is that joy isn’t just the dance party.
Somehow, that feels like more of a lower risk to me — and maybe something I can do.
Where are you at with joy in your life? How have you thought of joy in the past?
The Quieter Joy of God
To capture the true spirit of joy, we must rewind and go as far back as God’s response to his creation that we find in Genesis 1. Upon completion of the greatest of his creation — man and woman, made in his image — we see God’s response:
“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
The Hebrew words for the phrase “very good” conjure up an image of someone who responds with vehement or exceeding cheerfulness and joyfulness.
For six days, God had been creating one beautiful thing after another and was satisfied along the way. But when he made Adam and Eve, this was magnified even more. Think for a minute of a time when you were pleased with something that happened: perhaps you received a diploma after years of hard work, or maybe you completed a project you had been pouring yourself into for months. You may call this “satisfaction,” but if you look deeper, you may see another layer called joy. It moves past contented and into a space of gratitude.
This kind of joy was God’s response to us, too! (But way better than getting a diploma.) He was more than just content; he was very pleased and delighted.
And this didn’t stop with Adam and Eve!
I think what pulled at my heart the most about “Inside Out 2” was that the protagonist emotion Joy fought really, really hard when she saw that her girl Riley was having a hard time. She was tunnel-visioned; she was all-in.
God does this for us, too. He fights to bring us back to joy. He fights for us when we are stuck in anxiety and fear and sadness.
The Louder Joy of God
Okay so now we know that joy can be contented cheerfulness and calm delight. That’s the quieter side. But joy can be louder, too.
In his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, author C.S. Lewis concludes,
“Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
As humans in a broken world, we are weighed down by pain and fear and hurt, and so joy can sometimes seem unnecessary or unattainable.
But as we consider God and joy, we can look to the Book of Zephaniah in the Old Testament. The picture that we get in Zephaniah 3:16-17 of God’s response to his people, Israel, is important:
“The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”
The Hebrew phrase translated “he will rejoice over you with singing” can also be translated as “he rejoices over you with a shout of joy.”
Stop for a minute and consider the Lord of the Universe singing joy over you! This is not a small thing.
This is NOT A SMALL THING.
(Yes, I am yelling at you now with all caps, because I am like Joy in the movie — fighting for you to hear this very important point. 😊)
We are broken, sinful, and wayward. We turn to the left when we should go right; we sit when we should stand; we say no when God asks of us a yes. And yet, God rejoices over us, and with singing nonetheless! We sit in shame and hurt and think we are alone. And yet, God takes great delight in us, with love and assurance nonetheless!
Even now, if we were to get a good picture of heaven, we’d see this gift of joy playing out even among the angels! Peak through the curtain even now and we see it — that delight that cannot be squashed. In Luke 15:10, Jesus says,
“In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
Joy, it seems, permeates God’s world.
And I wonder if you can hear him as he sings with his full heart over you. Or maybe as he whispers safety and hope and love over you.
“Take it! Take it!” he whispers to us in our brokenness and pain. “Take joy!” he calls to our spirits that are bruised and hurting.
Take joy.
An Attempt to Sum This Up
So I sat in that movie theater, and after what felt like an eternity, the culmination of my worry and consternation came to its denouement — its wonderful conclusion.
After Anxiety had seemingly won and Riley was broken by fear and panic, the emotion of Sadness looked to Joy and gently said, “Joy, Riley wants to see you.”
😭
After being beaten down by anxiety and fear and worry, Riley found that twinkle in her eye and found that incredible thing called joy that had been buried down in her heart.
Maybe it is true that as we grow up and experience pain, we do feel less joy.
But I’m not okay with that. I know with all my heart that God is rejoicing over you, dear friend. I know that he is looking at you with a twinkle in his eye and is saying to you, “You are very good! Oh, and don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t.” I know with all my heart that even though we need to feel the entire emotional spectrum at times, that God wants our home base to be joy.
Maybe that feels like a dance party, or maybe it just feels like a thumbs-up from the God of the Universe.
I don’t know.
But I do know that he will keep fighting for you until the day that joy once again is strong in your heart.
And I am praying that if you are in a season where joy is not your dominant emotion, that you can at least be certain that God’s calm delight is washing over you and is ready to fill you to overflowing to make this hard world feel a bit easier.
Much love,
💚 Laurie
P.S! For those of you who have asked about Duncan from my post last week, the sweet guy has bravely found his way back to his safe place. ❤️
Beautiful essay, Laurie! You are wise beyond your years.