Recently, in a discussion group, someone brought up the passage "the joy of the Lord is my strength". It was explained as something to strive for, to be joyful all the time, never getting down or turned upside down, but always being the same and a sign of deep Godliness.
Something inside me withdrew as I head this explanation as I remembered hearing the repetition of these words when someone became emotional, or suffered from depression, or displayed fear - in fact they were the words used whenever any strong emotion was exhibited! And so somehow in the recesses of my brain these words have been religious rhetoric connected to the instructions to shut down and turn off the tears. They were a bit like the spiritual instruction for "Stepford Wife" behavioural patterns!
An after discussion on these words that Nehemiah spoke brought out that each of us had really no idea what was meant when he said "the joy of the Lord is your strength".
Joy, according to Oxford, means "1. deep feeling of pleasure, 2.thing causing delight".
Brennan Manning writes "Define yourself radically as one beloved by God".(pg 51 Abba's Child) which I am seeing as beginning to embrace that truth that God finds deep pleasure and delight in who I am, where I am here and now. If I can continue to embrace this truth there will be a kind of energy and anchoring for me.
Then I read this following passage about Jesus, and it blows the "Stepford Wife" definition, shut down emotions, kind of behaviour out the door:
"We have spread so many ashes over the historical Jesus that we scarcely feel the glow of His presence anymore. He is a man in a way that we have forgotten men can be: truthful, blunt, emotional, nonmanipulative, sensitive, compassionate - His inner child so liberated that He did not feel it unmanly to cry. He met people head on and refused to cut any deal at the price of His integrity. The gospel portrait of the beloved Child of Abba is that of a man exquisitely attuned to His emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. The Son of Man did not scorn or reject feelings as fickle and unreliable. They were sensitive emotional antennae to which He listed carefully and through which He perceived the will of His Father for congruent speech and action." (pg 89 Abba's Child - Brennan Manning)
Jesus isn't afraid of emotions and therefore it is why he loves our stories. This is someone who has pleasure and delight in me, in my story with all its darkness and Light, and who invites me to live in the reality of deep pain and the height of joy. Not that I do, but I want to because my deepest desire is to live vibrantly and passionately, embracing the present with all it holds - dark and Light.I am not sure I am any closer to defining what it means to live out the words "the joy of the Lord is your strength". But I am aware that as I learn to be obedient to the words "love yourself as well as you love your neighbour" and continue to define myself "radically as one beloved by God" that energy and anchoring moves it from words/rhetoric to authentic strength, which is tangible.