Joy is the Serious Business of Heaven

“Joy is the serious business of heaven”

Jeff Lampl
“God richly provides us with everything to enjoy”

                                    1 Timothy 6:17

If you want to experience joy you must . . . .

begin where you are.   God gives us joy in moments.  They are serendipities, moments of pleasure that intrude into our days.   The unexpected comforting smile from a cashier at Walmart just when you are feeling hurried, ungrateful and moody.   The glimpse of the beauty that comes to you through a moment’s glance out the window at a sunset while driving home from work, the momentary breath of the warm fresh scented air of spring.  

We, as least I, give those moments little thought most of the time, but I and we are wrong in doing so.   They are more than a cashier’s smile, far more than the beauty and freshness of nature.   These “pleasures are shafts of the glory of God itself” as they intrude on our self-preoccupied lives. 

Even bad pleasures are a means for God’s glory to visit us.   Stealing fruit from the Grocery store is bad.  But the taste of the fruit is still sweet.  The taste is a “shaft of the glory of God itself” which has been granted to us.   Of course the taste doesn’t make the stealing okay.   It makes it worse because in the stealing we have desecrated a holy gift of God.

So, just begin where you are today.  Give thanks for all the ways that God’s glory breaks through into your life today.  Notice all the little things that you take for granted, but shouldn’t.   It’s usually the “little things” that give life its greatest value.

BUT don’t stop with gratitude.  Gratitude is not enough.   These serendipitous “shafts of God’s glory” must become adoration.  

Kathy and I love the chirping of the birds in the early morning just outside our bedroom window when we wake up.  But is the chirping just birds chirping?   If I remove the “just” and realize that I am being “touched” by something more than “just birds chirping”, that the birds’ “singing” (notice how we even turn our language about the sounds the birds make into something more) is in reality a conduit, a means, a revelation, a brief taste of the world that is, that was and that will be to come.   It’s like, no, it is a momentary experience of God and of Heaven itself.

Gratitude says “thank you God for the gift of this moment”.   Adoration says, “I have just gotten a glimpse of God Himself” and I am humbled and amazed not only at having been given a gift, but also at God Himself.   I am grateful for he gift, but more than that I am humbled having been touched by the “finger of God”.  I praise not the gift, but Him.

There is no pleasure that is too ordinary to be dismissed as “just a pleasure”.*

"Lord, there are so many, many, many ways that Heaven, and You, Yourself, intersect with my daily life.   Give me today “ears to hear, eyes to see and mind to conceive” not just what you have prepared for each of us in the future, but also and especially what you present to us of yourself each and every day.  Amen"

*Today’s comments were inspired by C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm, chapter 17