Joy
“Your
success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your
joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.”
Helen
Keller
The
season of Advent in the Christian calender is one of peace, hope,
love and joy as the world prepares for the birth of the divine child.
This week the Joy candle is lit on the Advent wreath. We are to
explore our relationship to joy—what brings it and what takes it
away. Most of us have a strange relationship with joy, myself
included. On one hand, we feel it is our 'right,' and, on the other,
we set up all sorts of barriers to its free flow. We have
conditions—I will be joyful WHEN I have....and then there's
a long list of all the things we don't have. Where's the joy in that?
We
keep joy at bay, so to speak, until our conditions are met. We take
it hostage. It's not allowed to break out until we have what we set
out to get—the love of our lives, a soul mate, a great job, a new
house, whatever. What if we were to take Helen Keller's word's to
heart, and realize that joy is one prize that's available all the
time; it belongs to us already. Joy is like a favorite coat that's
been hanging in your closet forever, and you just forgot it was
there. At any time, you can open the door, take out the joy-coat and
put it on. It's yours.
The
only thing that stands in the way of joy is our decision not to have
it. Whether that is because we don't feel we deserve it, or we feel
it has to be earned, or that it simply isn't appropriate to our
life's circumstances, the decision is entirely ours to make. A happy
spirit is a choice. If we choose to embody it, then our orientation
to life's difficulties will change. Despite what comes, we will be
invincible.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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