Joy Happens – Unplanned

I’ve been reading Margaret Feinberg’s Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears, and I find this:

“Joy flows out of unsuspecting, and often daunting, places,” she writes. “It’s illogical, irrational, downright crazypants to think that great adversity could possibly lead to a fuller life. Yet that’s what I’ve discovered over many months of being poisoned, burned, injected, sliced, and diced.”

I pay attention to what Feinberg says, because she is writing as a breast cancer patient and survivor. She has been through the “cure is worse than the disease” treatment, and she pointedly says she does not consider cancer to be a gift.

But she finds joy, sometimes in the very belly of the cancer beast. Like when she handed out red balloons to other cancer patients and their families.

Joy is a word that we Christians often associate with their faith. Both we as children sang and with our own children sing “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart / Where? / down in my heart / down in my heart.”

The fact is that joy is something that we can’t plan for. It’s something that happens as a result, often the unintended result, of something else.

Standing in silence Canterbury Cathedral in 2013 for the 3 p.m. prayer time, I was nearly overwhelmed with joy by saying the Lord’s Prayer with 27 Japanese tourists.

Sitting in a church in Erfurt, Germany, interviewing a young pastor in 2002, joy flooded me, the pastor and the video cameraman to the point of tears.

At a church service at London’s Westminster Chapel, the time of “silent prayer” was replaced by speaking individual prayers out loud at the same time, and the church felt washed by joy as the voices rose and fused upward.

Or the first time I heard my first grandchild say something that sounded remotely like “Grandpa.”

Or during a particularly dark time, receiving an unexpected note that said simply, “I’m praying for you.”

Joy comes unexpected and unplanned, often sneaking in and upending you.

I can remember years ago, sitting next to my young wife and mother of my five-month-old son while she awakened from surgery to remover a possibly cancerous thyroid. When she awoke, her first words were, “Am I OK?” And the joy I experienced telling her YES! was a wonder, for both of us.

Feinberg is right. We find joy in often daunting places. It arrives unplanned. It brings with it the ability to bear often great hardship.

It is a gift.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Fight Back with Joy. To see more posts on this chapter, “Where I Never Expected to Find Joy,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph: Westminster Chapel in London, where the spoken aloud prayers went up and the joy came down. 

Voices rising

We are led in prayer

encouraged to pray

our own prayers aloud

so the voices rise at first

a quiet cacophony then

become louder merging

into a single, solitary

stream of many streams

and the current carries

the voice upward, outward,

spilling on to the sidewalk

and street, splattering

the man as he walks by.

Related:

We Are the Church (Part 2)

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.  

The blue ceiling

I keep looking at the blue ceiling

royal blue ceiling

crisscrossed by white timbers

framing the blue ceiling and think

of the blue heaven and the white bridge

to the blue heaven, the one way,

and consider the blue heaven

framing the white timbers

the heaven highlighting the one way.

The blue heaven remains, unchanged,

blue highlighting white

white highlighting blue

and I keep expecting to see the flames

of red, orange red, to lighten

the dark places

the dark spaces

the dark interiors.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

We Are the Church (Part 2)

When we stayed in London earlier this month, our hotel was right near (same block as) Westminster Chapel, a rather Victorian building (a variant on faux Romanesque). It had services on Sunday at 11 and 5:30, and other programs were advertised on the church doors, like Comedy Night on Mondays.

I looked up the church online – door to door from our hotel to the church, it might have been all of 90 seconds. And I discovered that this was the church where G. Campbell Morgan and David Martyn Lloyd-Jones had been pastors. The church had a long history of evangelism and outreach.

And, as it turned out, it still does.

On our last Sunday in London, I went to the 11 a.m. service. Keep in mind where this church is – three blocks from Westminster Abbey and Parliament, three blocks from Westminster Cathedral, three blocks from Buckingham Palace, and about two blocks from Scotland Yard. The area is called St. James Park, and it’s an interesting area for a church to be surrounded by all that royal, ecclesiastical and government power.

The interior of the church is what I would call “plainly beautiful” – a royal blue ceiling with white crossbeams (see the photo), unstained leaded glass windows, double balconies that curve like horseshoes around the interior until it reaches a beautiful and large pipe organ.

There were about 250 people waiting for the service to begin. The building could hold more – likely 1,500 or so.

The preacher that Sunday wasn't the regular minister but a member of the staff (who confessed during the sermon that he was a former attorney).

The worship service was contemporary, which for some odd reason didn't seem out of place int hat old building. I think the reason was the congregation.

To be alliterative, I would call the congregation demonstrably demographically diverse.

Young. Old. Children, Babies. Singles. Families. Various racial backgrounds. In fact, likely all of the major racial backgrounds. The congregation was not homogeneous by any stretch of the imagination.

Some of the hymns were familiar (if a Chris Tomlin song can be considered a hymn). Some weren't familiar at all. The minister, in blue jeans and open collared shirt, was a gifted preacher.

But what I found most remarkable was the prayer time, two of them, in fact.

The individual prayers were not silent. They were spoken aloud. Gradually, as more and more people prayed – aloud – the murmuring grew collectively louder. And it seemed to combine and become one, a fusion of many voices of many people becoming one voice.

A voice called the church.

Related:

We Are the Church (Part 1)

Glass, no stain (poem)

Glass, no stain

The window glass is not clear

but it is not colored, no stain

to reflect reds, yellows, blues.

The light filters through,

suffusing and bathing the interior

and this on a cloudy day.

This poem is submitted to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets. To see more poems, pleasevisit the site. The links will be live at 2 p.m. Central time today. 

The poem was inspired by my attending a Sunday service at Westminster Chapel, London.

Photograph via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.