“Be joyful always.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16
WHACK.
The crack echoed from one ear to the other as my head smacked up against the wall. It hurt … so bad. Stopped dead in my tracks, I felt my forehead for a split and a drip of blood and was relieved to find neither. With frozen veggies applied to the place of impact, I went back to survey how I missed a literal wall. I walked into it full force. Ever since my family moved, I continually make wrong turns in the new house, because the daily paths I walked at the old house had become so automatic. Every time I get to the top of the staircase, I turn to the right …but turning to the right no longer leads me to my room …it’s a left-hand turn now. I wish I could say my collision with the wall that day was the only casualty to my adjustment to all the directional changes in my daily path.
The Bible commands us, “be joyful aways!” But let’s face it, we’re not joyful when we run smack into a wall at full speed. No amount of frozen veggies applied to the place of impact makes us feel better about running into a literal wall. Thankfully, the kind of joy Paul wrote of in this verse, and the Bible commands us to take hold of, isn’t a fleeting feeling. There’s no proverbial wall we can run into in this life that will snatch away the joy we have in the Lord. This joy helps us stagger over to the freezer and grab the bag and endure the pain until it subsides.
The real walls we smack into and scale in life require a joy bigger and stronger than the fleeting feeling of happiness or the relief of laughter as we roll through our favorite sitcom on Netflix. No, joy in the Lord is our strength, as Nehemiah wrote. Joy is the substance and root of our strength to endure this life on earth. It’s going to be hard and it’s going to be unfair, but it isn’t without joy. That’s because our joy is rooted in the Lord. As we pray today, let us seek the Lord for a fresh perspective on the walls in our lives.
Read the full devotional here.
Video created by Kayla Koslosky.
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