Tag Archives: joy

by | October 22, 2022 · 3:54 am

Coping Better with Unwanted Change: Four Steps to Greater Peace and Joy (Conclusion)

Conclusion

The four-step restorative process that we have been discussing in successive weeks—See, Accept, Appreciate, and Delight—is simple in theory, but often takes a fair amount of work and patience to move through all the steps fruitfully. Are you seeing progress? If not, go back to the earlier steps, and spend more time thinking, praying, and processing until you feel ready to move forward to the next step.

No matter how much you may still be struggling with one or more steps, the way forward will surely include thinking positively, prayer, and applying your faith in concrete ways. Paul’s teaching to the Philippians speaks directly to this spiritual truth.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice….

Do not be anxious for anything, but in everything, with thanksgiving,

make your requests known to God.

And the God of peace will fill your hearts and minds

with the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Finally, whatever is true, whatever is noble,

whatever is right, whatever is pure,

whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable

—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—

think about such things.

Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me,

or seen in me—put it into practice.

And the God of peace will be with you.

Philippians 4:4, 6-9, NIV

When the Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippian Christians, he was in in prison for his faith, facing the possibility of execution. Yet, amazingly, he was able to be at peace and find joy in the midst of his suffering. He accepted his difficult circumstances and appreciated the opportunities they gave him to serve Christ and the Gospel ministry. He gave his heart to those in whom he delighted, and he laser-focused his mind on all the good and beauty he could see and perceive in the world and in others.

Such positive thinking and faith will not spare any of us from loss, unfair treatment, and suffering. You will struggle with many painful things throughout your life, just as I do every day. Yet, when I focus on what I’ve lost or can’t have or do, I get grumpy or depressed. When I focus on trying to please myself, I may feel happier for a while, but the feeling doesn’t last or doesn’t satisfy. However, when I delight in my relationship with God, in loving my family, friends, and neighbors, in thinking more about what I could give than what I could get, and in all the beauty and goodness in this amazing world, my life is often delight-full. And peace and joy are frequent companions.

In Practice

What step are you ready to take next? See? Accept? Appreciate? Or, Delight?

Find a quiet place where you can sit and breathe deeply for a few minutes. Detach yourself from whatever emotional turmoil you might be feeling and quietly observe yourself. Then, depending on where you are in the restorative process, choose one or more of the following steps to take.

Step 1: Name the unwanted change or loss in your life that is troubling you. Ask God for help by praying, “Loving God, please help me to see what I need to see. Give me courage to face the truth, and wisdom and strength to act on whatever you reveal.” Then, when you feel ready, tell yourself, “I can face this. I will face this. I want to be able to go on with my life.”

Step 2: When you can clearly see the troubling turn of events that you cannot change, take a deep breath, exhale loudly, saying, “The truth[CK2]  is clear. This is the way things are now. It’s not what I wanted, but I can accept it.” Repeat these sentences until you can express them with conviction and power in your voice.

Step 3: When you feel that you’ve let go of most of the emotional charge you’ve been carrying, turn your attention to your blessings and opportunities. Say aloud, “There’s more to my life than what I lost. I’m ready to start counting my blessings and looking for the opportunities that God may give me. I’m ready to move forward with my life.” The first few times you try to say these words, you may choke up or break down in tears. If moving on were easy, you would have done it a long time ago. Don’t give up. Keep saying these words until you believe them and feel your energy start to shift.

Step 4: Give yourself permission to enjoy your life again. Pray, “Loving Creator, please help me to delight in you more than in anyone or anything else. Please enable me to love what you love, to enjoy what you have given me to enjoy and to do, and to order my life by what you most desire.” Then, make a date with yourself. Perhaps it’s as simple as taking a day off or spending time in the garden. Maybe it’s sitting at the piano, singing a song, holding a baby, playing a game, or going for a walk. It’s time to laugh and love.

Bottom Line: Think positively and keep your eyes on your Creator and on Jesus. In life, there will always be so much that you cannot control, and so much suffering that you cannot avoid, but the more you focus your mind on and open your heart to whatever is good, beautiful, admirable, and life-giving, the better. The more you put your anxieties and grief in God’s hands, the sooner you will know the peace that surpasses understanding and the joy your heart longs for.

Suggested Prayer

“Loving God, I want to experience greater peace and joy, and I want to be the kind of person who brings more peace, joy, and love into the lives of others. Please draw me closer to you and lead me out of all those places where I feel stuck emotionally. Help me to see, accept, appreciate, and delight more and more in you and all the good you have for me to experience and to do. Thank you. In Christ’s name, I pray. Amen.”

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by | October 2, 2022 · 7:00 pm

Coping Better with Unwanted Change: Four Steps to Greater Peace and Joy (Step 4)

We’ve been talking about a four-step restorative process to help you cope better with unwanted change or loss in your life. Once you can see and accept what you’ve lost or cannot change (Steps 1-2) and have started to appreciate your remaining blessings and opportunities (Step 3), you will experience more peace and joy. But there’s still another step.

Hiking through the Swiss Alps

Step 4: “Delight”

Trust in the LORD and do good;

dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

Take delight in the LORD,

and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Psalm 37:3-4 (NIV)

What do you take delight in? What are the desires of your heart?

For me, I love my birthday, which I just celebrated last week. As usual, I took the day off from work to do whatever I felt like doing, all day long. I went out for breakfast, spent hours interacting with well-wishers on Facebook, reflected on my life and future, read something I was very interested in, celebrated with my family, and, of course, ate ice cream!

But birthday delights, holidays, Friday night dates, lazy Sunday afternoons, and other special times are the spice of life for me, not the main course. In the right measure, the little (or big) treats in life bring me a lot of joy. Too much of them, and they lose their specialness. If I try to take too much from them, they can become like idols—alluring and wonderfully distracting from weights and responsibilities, but lacking sufficient nutrition for my psychological, physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. If my delights become addictions, they become my masters and can even slowly destroy my life or the lives of others.

From Scripture, we learn that God gave us many wonderful things in nature, in our beloved relationships, in our vocations, and in many other aspects of our lives. They are God’s gifts to us, and key ingredients to living fully and joyfully. God wants us to delight in them, providing that our greatest love is for our Creator God. If we keep this relationship first in our hearts, then then rest of our desires, delights, and loves will fall into their proper places, in the right proportions.

When I was teenager, I thought that these verses in Psalm 37 meant that if you put God first in your life (“delight in the LORD”), then God would give you whatever you most want (“the desires of your heart”)—perhaps a lovely spouse, riches, property, good friends, fun experiences, etc. etc. But one day it dawned on me that there may be a more profound way to view this promise. Instead of interpreting these verses as describing something transactional (if you do this, then God will do that), the process may actually be transformational (if you do this, then your heart and mind will be changed, leading to an entirely new set of desired outcomes).

When the Psalmist says, “delight in the LORD,” he is not talking about saying or doing something just to try to win God’s favor to get something from God. Rather, he’s saying, genuinely take pleasure in your relationship with God, just as Jesus taught us to do when he said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). Then, the more your heart’s desire is genuinely to know, love, and serve God with all your being, the more you will want what God wants for you, i.e., to live righteously (or justly) and to do good, or in Jesus’ words, to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:38). Delighting in your Creator God leads to delighting in fulfilling God’s good purposes for your life. And when you think and feel this way, the greatest joy and privilege God could ever give you would be to enable you to know, love, and serve God even better, and to receive more opportunities to let God love others through you.

For me, delighting in God includes taking time to appreciate all that God has done in creation and in my life. As a minister and professor, it also translates to spending most days happily teaching, researching, writing, coaching, praying for or with others, mentoring, and trying to help or encourage those who cross my path. As a married man with children, delighting in God and God’s calling on my life also means loving my wife and family as best I can.

I’m deeply grateful for the life that God has given me and for the ways Christ has inspired and called me to worship, serve, and love. Even with all the suffering, loss, and difficulties I and my family have had to endure over the years, putting God and Christ at the center of my heart and priorities has given me great meaning, purpose, peace, and joy, which I could not have found in the same way otherwise.

For you, delighting in God first may look different than it does for me, because you have your own relationship with God and Christ, and unique calling. But the spiritual principle is true for all those who can accept it, and the result of ordering your life in this way (greater peace and joy) will be the same: When you choose to delight in God and let God transform your heart’s desires to match God’s desires, God will surely give you the desires of your heart.

In Practice

By now, you should be experiencing the fruit of working through the first three steps: See, Accept, and Appreciate. But don’t stop there. Make a conscious decision to move toward finding and doing more things that delight you. And start with God.

If you’re ready to take the fourth step, reflect on the following questions.

  • Where are you looking for pleasure, peace, and joy from day to day?
  • How well does what you delight in line up with what God wants you to delight in?
  • What would it look like for you if you delighted more in God and God’s good purposes for your life?
  • If your heart’s desire matched God’s desire for you more closely, how would you order your life differently? What would you be praying for?

Bottom line: You can make a lot of progress toward greater peace and joy in your life by seeing, accepting, and appreciating. But the most important step of them all is Step 4: “Delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”

Suggested prayer: “Loving God, I want what you want for me and my life. Please teach me to delight in you, and transform the desires of my heart to match yours.”

Next week: The conclusion to this series of articles with more practical suggestions for how to move through the four steps to greater peace and joy in your life

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by | May 18, 2020 · 4:51 pm

What Can We Expect from God Now? (Essay 7 of 7)

Spiritual Truth 7: Expect to be renewed, as you accept your limitations and wait on God.

In the waking dream that I wrote about in my last essay, I saw a huge wall of water that looked as if it were going to break at any moment and wash me away. I could see all my anxieties spread out on a blanket on the ground in front me. I wanted to fold the blanket around them, as I usually do, to lift them up into God’s hands. But I couldn’t. It was too heavy! When I looked more closely, I realized that there was a huge boulder in the middle of the blanket. How was I going to lift that up?

At first, I didn’t know what to do. Then, for some reason, I began to slowly approach the big rock. I cautiously put my hand on it, and much to my surprise, it began to shrink. It turns out that it was actually an earth-filled piece of ice, which began to melt with my touch. The smaller it became, I the lighter I felt.

Afterward, I realized what the dream meant. When our anxieties feel too heavy to lift to God, we may need to face our worries head on first. Instead of just reacting to them, denying them, running away from them, or simply being a prisoner to them, we can gather our courage and approach them directly. As we name (“touch”) them, we are likely to learn something about them and ourselves that will set us free from their power. They may turn out to not be as big or threatening as we thought, or we may gain insight as to how to handle them better. Or else, we may simply let them go.

The combination, then, of consciously addressing the nature of our worries and trusting God to act is freeing and renewing.

Spiritual Truth 7: Expect to be renewed, as you accept your limitations and wait on God. (Heb. 2:15; Isaiah 40:28-31; Eph. 3:20-21)

In one of the most often-quoted chapters of the Bible, Isaiah 40 offers words of comfort to the people of Israel, who were languishing in captivity in Babylon. They could do nothing to change their circumstances. They were stressed, afraid, and felt a huge weight of guilt. They were suffering the consequences of their sin and poor choices. So, Isaiah writes these now famous words:

Have you not known? Have you not heard?

The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.

He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.

Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;

but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,

they shall mount up with wings like eagles,

they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.

Isa. 40:28-31, NRSV

There is so much hope and encouragement in these words. You and I get weary and exhausted. Yahweh (the LORD) never tires and his strength is inexhaustible. As we hit the wall or sag under the weight of our worries, we must look beyond ourselves to the Creator of the universe. The everlasting God is the one who can lift our heavy burdens and renew our spirits.

We must “wait for the LORD (Yahweh)” by admitting our limitations and human frailty and by putting our hope in what only God can do. And when we do, we will often feel lighter. We will find that we can open up our hearts and minds to the Spirit again. We will become refreshed and more energized. We will be better able to fulfill our purpose in life, to know, love, and serve God. In Isaiah’s imagery, we will “mount up with wings like eagles.” We will “run and not be weary.”

Let anxiety be your teacher

Anxiety is a normal part of human experience that often feels stressful and burdensome. However, if we let anxiety be our teacher, it can reveal something about our situation and our fears that could be helpful.

For example, when we feel anxious, it often means that something important is at stake. We, or someone or something we care deeply about, are threatened. If we stay in the anxious thoughts and feelings, we’ll be miserable. But if we let our anxiety guide us to a deeper understanding of our own values and needs, we may gain new insight into what’s going on and if, what, and when we can do something about it. 

Practically, I have found it very helpful to divide my anxieties into one of three categories. First, I have to face and name them. Then, I need to first decide for each one, is there something I can do about this concern? Depending on my answer, I put it into one of three categories: Act, Wait, or Let Go.

Category 1: Act.

If there seems to be something I can do, the worry goes in Category One: Act. For example, when COVID-19 started spreading everywhere in the USA, I worried about whether or not my family and I were going to get sick or even die. I immediately realized that, while I could not control the spread of the virus, we could try to protect ourselves. As soon as we took action to do what was within our power to do (e.g., to wear masks, wash our hands regularly, socially distance ourselves from others, avoid crowded places, etc.), our anxiety levels started going down. The danger didn’t go away, but our anxiety lessened because we were doing something to help ourselves.

Category 2: Wait.

If the worry is something that I can’t do anything about now, because I’m waiting on information or someone else’s actions, then it goes into Category 2: Wait. For example, will I be able to conduct my scheduled workshops in Myanmar and Vietnam this fall? Will I be able to teach again at Myanmar Institute of Theology (MIT) second semester? When will it be safe enough for me to travel internationally?

I can’t know the answer to these questions now. I have to wait to see what the Myanmar government decides, whether the virus can be contained, and what kind of safeguards can be put in place. For now, instead of worrying about what I think the authorities should do or about what I’m going to be able to do, I need to tell myself, the time is coming when I will know the answers. Until then, I need to wait. I need to turn my attention to what I can do something about (Category 1) and to wait to see what God is going to do.

Category 3: Let go.

Finally, many times, the thing I am anxious about is completely out of my control, and there is nothing I can do. For example, I’m wondering, are my students and colleagues in Myanmar and my other global partners going to be O.K? Will there be an economic depression? Will the world ever fully recover from the pandemic? These kinds of issues are ongoing. They will probably remain as a threat indefinitely. Waiting for answers could go on forever. So, I tell myself, I will cross that bridge when I get to it. Until then, if there’s nothing I can do, I’m going to let it go. It’s O.K. I don’t need to hang on to a worry that I can’t do anything about.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Old city of Jerusalem, Israel)

Spiritual Application

How heavy is your load these days?

If you can gather your worries together and put them in God’s hands, do it! But if the weight seems too much, or your circumstances too overwhelming, try this: Muster your courage and move toward your anxieties. Name (touch) each one, and ask it, “What do you want me to know about you? What can you tell me that might help me to cope better?”

Is there something, anything, you could do to help alleviate your worries? If so, it is time to Act. Do what is within your power to help yourself. If, on the hand, there’s nothing for you to do now, then, tell yourself to Wait. Wait for the time when action is possible again and focus your attention on better things in the meantime. Finally, if the worry is completely outside of your control or the dangers are ongoing, then Let go.

The more you face your own human limitations and accept that you are only responsible for what is within your power to do, the freer you will become. You will stop trying to carry burdens that are not meant for you to carry. You will rest more peacefully in the Father’s immense love. You will spend your days living fully, being creative, and sharing Christ’s love and light with all those you most care about.

In your own strength, you are going to reach your limits. That’s why you get weary and exhausted. So, stop trying to lift what is too heavy for you, and stop worrying about things that may never happen. Put your burden into God’s hands and wait for him to act in his way and timing. Stop worrying so much about what you cannot control or do, and let the Holy Spirit renew your heart, soul, and mind. The old cliché, “let go and let God,” is actually quite biblical…and helpful. It’s also the way to greater peace and joy.

Now to him who by the power at work within us

is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine,

to him be glory in the church

and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Eph. 3:20-21

Next week: In the conclusion to this essay series, I will be sharing my personal story of how I learned to trust God again after personal tragedy.

Help us spread the good word! To reach more people who need biblical and practical words of encouragement in the midst of the COVID-19, global crisis, we are translating these essays into 10 different languages spoken in various parts of Myanmar, India, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). If you have been touched or encouraged by one or more of these essays, please help spread the word by sharing it with others, and by supporting our efforts to reach more people by making a donation to Faith, Hope, and Love Global Ministries, today.

To read previous essays in Burmese or certain Chin dialects, visit fhlglobal.org.

CONTEXT: I CREATED THIS ESSAY SERIES IN RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 GLOBAL CRISIS. EACH ESSAY EXPANDS ON THE PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS OFFERED IN THE SPIRIT-LED LEADER: NINE LEADERSHIP PRACTICES AND SOUL PRINCIPLES (HERNDON, VA: ALBAN INSTITUTE, 2005), PAGES 184-90.

Photo Credits:

  • All photos, copyright ©Jill Geoffrion, www.jillgeoffrion.com. Used with permission. Photo of multi-ton, dolmen was taken in the Eure-et- Loire valley, France.

Copyright © 2020 Timothy C. Geoffrion, Wayzata, Minnesota. All rights reserved to the author, but readers may freely download, print, forward, or distribute to others, providing that this copyright notice is included.

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