Welcome faithful family, friends, and followers. Thank you for finding our new home and for your continued prayerful support and encouragement. We had a lovely Labor Day weekend spending time with family and friends and taking many long walks in the beautiful weather we experienced.
In launching The Life With Joy blog, one of our stated and desired goals is to find opportunities to share the encouragement, comfort, and joy we have genuinely experienced on this rather arduous journey. But one of the things I am cautious of in sharing the reality of the comfort we have received, is above all, to not have my thoughts come across as cliché. We come from a faith tradition steeped in cliché, which is most often expressed with all sincerity, but is, none the less, often received, especially by those who do not come from a faith tradition or from a totally different faith paradigm, as well, “cliché.”
So over time, I have tried my best to sincerely express our believe in and appreciation for the grace and mercy we feel God has faithfully shown, but have also kept looking for opportunities to more fully express the breadth and depth of the comfort and joy we have experienced along the way. So, when this weekend, as I was reading 2 Corinthians and I felt our story and experience seemed to literally jump off the page at me, I wanted to take this opportunity to share it with you. Now I realize, not everyone reading this accepts the Bible as an inspired work and may consider it cliché in itself, but at least my hope is, that by sharing directly from scripture, our expression is more grounded than in a simple clichéish axiom of the faith. Please read this as Joy’s and my heartfelt words to each of you which we share with all sincerity and desire to encourage and comfort you as you have encouraged and comforted us.
From Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians…
“All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ. Even when we are weighed down with troubles, it is for your comfort and salvation! For when we ourselves are comforted, we will certainly comfort you. Then you can patiently endure the same things we suffer. We are confident that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in the comfort God gives us…
We were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who raises the dead. And he did rescue us from mortal danger, and he will rescue us again. We have placed our confidence in him, and he will continue to rescue us. And you are helping us by praying for us. Then many people will give thanks because God has graciously answered so many prayers for our safety…
For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ. We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure…
We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies…
That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.” (2 Cor 1:3-11, 4:6-10, 16-18)
To me, this passage so beautifully encapsulates the experience of our faith on this journey. We have felt the triune presence of God in the most real and manifest ways. Through long nights with medical devices beeping and alarming in the background, in watching Joy’s broken body and mind struggle first to survive and then to heal, in reaching milestones of recovery, and in dealing with crushing setbacks that at times sapped the life out of us, in all these times, I and as Joy wishes me to specifically share her agreement, have had an overwhelming sense of the presence of God and a peace and joy that truly does pass understanding.
But I’ll stop there, because I am dangerously close to slipping into cliché. However, I sincerely hope, that this expression of our experience, can be an honest encouragement to you, because it is our desire for you all to know what a tremendous encouragement you are to us. As I’ve said many times, there are no words to adequately describe how much we appreciate you and how much we need each and every one of you. Please keep the prayers for continued healing and restoration going strong and please check back as we keep you updated on our journey.