Blah...blah...blah...Choose Joy..blah...blah...blah

Joy

I don't know what the word "joy" evokes for you, but I think all of us come at that word from a different background. I grew up believing (and I think I still do) that joy is distinct from happiness, though maybe that line is closer today than it used to be. The distinction, I was taught, is that joy flows out of choices made because of our relationship to God, while happiness emerges from our experiences in the moment. Thus, the writer of Hebrews could say that, "...for joy set before, [Jesus] endured the cross..." Was Jesus "happy" to go through the trial at Calvary? I don't know, but I can confidently say He faced the cross with joy.

Maybe the Apostle James had Calvary in mind when he penned the above words in the first chapter of his epistle, stating that you and I are to choose joy when we face trials, too.

Back in 2015 when I lost my job and all of us were experiencing massive upheaval, happiness wasn't abundant during those first few months. In fact, I remember a moment in June, right before the kids were out of school and a week or two before we set out on a cross-country road trip to start summer, that my wife and I experienced one of those laugh-yourselves-silly moments, and it had been one of the first of such events, since January.

But Joy wasn't as elusive. In fact, I recall many moments of joy and deep satisfaction in spite of homelessness, joblessness, and significant uncertainty. Our relationship to Christ made it possible to choose joy, because we knew, at the core of our existence, that God was using our trials to produce grit, character, and whatever was missing for whatever was in our future. Our faith in Him gave our suffering purpose; even if we didn't know or understand what the purpose was.

This blog is read by hundreds, sometimes, thousands of different people each week, and I know, in that large of a group, many of you are experiencing difficult decisions, painful trials and heart-breaking challenges. I want to encourage you with the words of James, and challenge you to embrace, in faith, God's Word, that He is using this in your life for your greatest good and His ultimate glory.

The promised result of your faith isn't the end of suffering, rather, it's even better: joy. How can you choose joy today in your trial? What's one decision you can make to find joy in today's heart ache?

A Bun Dance?

Abundance

There are three main components required to live the Overboard Life: faith, courage and abundance. Faith is about putting our focus on what Jesus is doing in our lives and in the world around us, and on the unchanging, all-powerful nature of our God. Courage is a character quality that God is developing in us as we trust in  the work of the Spirit to move us to follow God, in faith, and to trust that what He is doing, that what He is asking of us, is truly what's best. Courage is what allows us to grab the sides of the boat and take the jump out on to the water.

When I was writing my third book, Overboard, I was trying to come up with the key components of living the Overboard Life, working out a way to express them in writing. The first two seemed natural to me, the faith and courage parts. But the third one eluded me for a while. (I'm a Baptist...I need three points and a poem for it to "count"!)

I batted around a few ideas, like "Hope" or "Love" or "Service" or "Eating Tacos" but none of them seemed to quite encapsulate what I was after. One day, Traci and I were talking about these key themes when God finally granted some clarity.

Hope, love, service and eating tacos are all good things, and obviously, all part of the Christian Life (especially the tacos!). But when it comes to leaping Overboard for the Lord, I realized the missing piece had to do with God's capacity to overwhelm us with everything we need, whenever we need it. He doesn't give out faith sparsely, He doesn't build our courage in limited amounts, but rather, He provides all we need in abundance because He know precisely what we need and when we need it.

To live the Overboard Life we have to embrace that God is an abundant God, that He never lacks in anything, and that He loves to overwhelm His children with His presence (that very thing we need most!). He is the giver of every good and perfect gift (James 1:17), the supplier of rain, sun and daily sustenance (Matthew 6:25-27), and He meets all of our needs according to His abundance (Philippians 4:19)!

Naturally, God's abundance doesn't mean all we have to do is "name it" and "claim it," as if God is some how obligated to give us what we want when we want it. Rather, through faith, we trust that God is able to do His work, in and through us, doing more than we could ever imagine, guess or request in our wildest dreams (Ephesians 3:20). So courageously we follow Him in obedience and watch Him supply our needs in abundance.

Where do you need to trust in God's abundance today? What promise from His Word do you need to rest in, believing that He can fulfill (and will!) it, not in scarcity, but in abundance?