"Hey Soren, where's the Joy in your life?"
I get this a lot. Like, way the hell more often than I want to hear this question. People always seem to assume that if I'm always grimface and rarely happy, I must not be a real Christian or some shit. Occasionally, I wonder if they're right. I mean hey, if God really does pour Joy into his followers, then why am I always depressed, right?
Here's a rather typical experience:
>Go to my PCM, skip church to do homework
>Get home, study for half an hour
>Score 42/45 on the first of two online tests
>Two classmates come over while they wait for a third to get home
>girl asks about guns
>Show her the 1911, WASR, and Savage Mk. II
>Teach her the three rules of gun safety
>She wants me to teach her to shoot
>I feel like F*** YEAH, MAN!!
>Third person gets home, they leave
>Random crushing depression
What the hell, man. I should not be depressed, but for some reason, I feel like shit. I know this isn't a rational emotion, so at least I know better than to act on it, but I hate this shit. I should be feeling awesome. I got to teach someone about guns, one of the few subjects in life that I have near-expert levels of knowledge of.
Now, obviously they only showed up to my house because they had to wait for a third person to get home at the girl's house. So I shouldn't take that to mean that they only tolerate me when they need me, that's unfair to them. But fuckin' depression, man. Strikes anywhere, all the time.
So, back to Joy. Where is the joy in my life? I'll get onto that just as soon as I figure out what the word actually means. So I used my google-fu (which is VERY strong) and looked up what Joy is. Turns out that Biblically, Joy is...wait, actually, I'm going to just quote the guy:
"Biblical joy consists of the deep and abiding confidence that all is well regardless of circumstance and difficulty."
John MacArthur (Not the General with the corncob pipe, that was Douglas)
So, using that definition, let me look at my life:
First off, I know, and I mean *know* on a gut level, that things will be OK, and are in fact OK right now. My emotions do not dictate reality, and the reverse is also false.
Second, fuckin' bring it, man. I can handle depression, it's not a limiting factor in my life. So when I start feeling depressed, I want to laugh it off. It's not going to stop me, and it's not a sign that God has abandoned me, and it's not even a sign that I'm in the wrong place.
Third, according to Nehemiah 8:10, "The Joy of the Lord is my strength". Well, I am a particularly resilient man. I've gone through a lot of shit in my life, and not only am I still going stronger than ever, I'm more and more motivated to learn from the past and do it right the next time.
His Joy, my strength.
The more nihilistically I view the world, the more I find myself unable to comprehend living for anything but God, the tougher I get. When I was concerned about finding a career job, buying a house, and finding a nice girl to marry, it seemed like every little thing got me down, and I was always depressed. But the depression back then made it hard to get out of bed, made it hard to work, made it hard to live.
Nowadays, depression just makes it hard to smile. Smiling's overrated. I'm still here, and wether or not I can smile 24/7 is irrelevant. I will not quit, since God put me here, and I'm not about to bitch out on the only real, driving, motivating thing in my life, the thing that's given me more meaning and purpose than anything else, ever.
Some days it seems like actually making it through flight school is going to prove impossible, and some days it seems like ever finding a worthwhile lady is less likely than that. But every time I start feeling down, regardless of the reason I start to feel like it's all worthless, I try to remind myself that God put me here.
Not just "here" on earth, but here in this house, at this time, at this school, in this major. So...maybe I would be a horrible missionary at this time. I freely admit that one, actually. I'm also not done with training, not done growing, not done with anything.
I often joke that I'm here because God ran out of polite, well-spoken, and Biblically-smart folks, so He got desperate and called a bitter, pissed-off, foul-mouthed asshole with a legendary reputation for being stubborn, knowing that at the very least, I'd make things entertaining.
The crazy thing is, the only thing that had really been missing in my life for all those years was a worthy cause to throw it all away on. God gave me that when He called me to be a missionary pilot, and while I'm still a little bitter, still often pissed, still occasionally foul-mouthed, what He needs is people who have reputations for being stubborn.
So, where's the Joy in my life? It's when I find a way to be stubborn *for* God, not myself. It's where I keep going when people tell me that I'm wasting my time up here. It's why I didn't quit when it seemed impossible. It's when I drove up here with no job, no savings, and enough money to buy groceries and pay the first month's rent.
It's when I get a 24-hour ban from Opchan for telling some guy to get it through his head: I'm not trying to bang every hot girl at MBI-S because I have far more important things to do, like getting trained to fly planes for Jesus, and if they don't think I'm worth dating, I will be happy to leave them behind when I fly away.
It's when some random anon on 99chan lets me know that I'm the reason he reopened his Bible.
That's my joy. That's when I'm really smiling, when I feel like a million bucks. My emotions are meaningless. They're not even real. The money in my wallet is only there because God provided it, it's not mine. The car in my driveway, the guns under my bed, the laptop that brings me all the knowledge I can ever handle...God provided all of it.
My joy is when I get to use my pathetic talents for God. It's not my emotions, it's not my stuff, it's not the people around me, it's just being secure in the knowledge that even though I'm the bottom of the barrel, God is using me for His goals.
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