Tending Joy for Saturday, February 17

We are treated… as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing…

2 Corinthians 6:8-9

Connect with creation: find joy amid distress

Joy as portrayed in the Bible has a notable capacity to mingle with other emotions. Joy can share space with confusion, pain, or grief, for instance. When writing to the church in Corinth, Paul demonstrates this quality of joy by suggesting that we can rejoice while we feel sorrowful. Joy and sorrow aren’t mutually exclusive. Joy can simply coexist with our other emotions, neither canceling them out nor overriding them.

Today, go outside and notice places or objects that capture this coexistence of opposites: a green shoot pushing its way through a layer of ice, buds forming on leafless trees, roots pushing through a layer of concrete, or a sunset made particularly vivid by air pollution, for example. See if you can recognize the joy of something beautiful without overriding your distress at the circumstance in which it persists.