DAILY DEVOTIONAL
June 6 — Joy, not happiness
A spoken reading of this is being recorded — it will appear here soon.
June 6 — Joy, Not Happiness
"Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our LORD: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength." — Nehemiah 8:10 (KJV)
Joy is not the same as a good mood. A good mood is weather. Joy is climate.
Most of the platforms we touch are weather machines. A video makes us smile, an argument in the comments makes us tense, a notification makes a small dopamine flicker. The mood shifts every few minutes. By bedtime, we have run through twenty small weathers and we are tired and we cannot remember why.
Nehemiah says the joy of the Lord is our strength. Strength, not stimulation. The joy he is talking about is the settled, slow knowledge that we are held — that the story we are inside has a good ending, that the God who began the work is faithful to finish it. Phil 1:6. That kind of joy does not depend on the day going well. It sits underneath the day.
A family can practice this. When the day has been hard — a tantrum, a missed bus, a bad meeting — we can still say the truth out loud at dinner. God is good. He is with us. He has not left. The mood at the table will not turn immediately. The joy underneath will. The joy was already there. We just named it.
Today, when something small goes wrong, try not to fix the mood. Name the joy underneath instead. The strength comes from there.
May the Lord bless you and keep you.