Around the Corner from Gate 65!
Traveling
for vacation is fun; business travel is not so fun. This week I experienced the later with great
abundance in New York City. Lack of
sleep, hours of meetings, followed by endless traffic jams, was topped off by
an angry TSA agent wildly suspicious of my laptop computer and red suit
jacket. The crazy rush came to an abrupt
halt when the flight was suddenly delayed.
It’s funny how sometimes you have the most profound life changing
moments, at the most inconvenient times, in the most unusual places. For me this was the ladies restroom at the JFK
airport, in terminal 2, around the corner from gate 65.
She
was small in stature, somewhere in her 70’s, pushing a huge cleaning cart to
the back of the restroom. The restroom
was crowded. Hurried exhausted travelers
were scattered about, waiting in line, while some performed various degrees of preventative
hygiene trying to rid themselves of travel germs and grime. I seriously saw a woman cleaning her feet in
the sink, but that’s not what changed my life.
It was the cleaning lady. The
petite older woman, in the midst of the complete chaos, was humming. She was smiling and literally humming aloud, a
sort of Bollywood ballad tune. It was
beautiful; it was soothing; it was just what I needed. I watched her navigate her cart and smile at
all the frazzled women, myself included.
Resembling
Mother Teresa, her bright brown eyes smiled as she joyfully hummed her tune and
went about her work. Her peaceful calm
state of joy was contagious, at least to me, and I found myself changed walking
out of that restroom. It made me stop
and realize that I needed to just take a breath. I realized, just by hearing the sweet melody
of her song, there’s a lot to be grateful for.
I can either be frustrated and miserable in this moment or I can simply
hum. It really is a choice. The question I seek to answer this week is
how does she do it? We’ve all met people
like that, the continuously endless bundles of joy. How do they do it? If feeling joyful is a choice, how the heck
do you choose joy when you’re just not feeling it?
A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit
dries up the bones.
Proverbs 17:22
James
1:2 says, “When troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great
joy.” That seems all great and dandy but seriously? If we’re being real, my first reaction when I feel
troubled isn’t great joy. Not even
close. How about panic, anxiety, fear
and worry, for starters? Depending on
how troubling the “trouble”, I reserve the right to gripe and moan, at least
for a little bit. Great joy isn’t what
pops in at the top of my list of feelings, if I’m being real.
In his
book, “How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong,” Lewis B. Smedes writes,
“You and I were created for joy, and if we miss it, we miss the reason for our
existence! Moreover, the reason Jesus
Christ lived and died on earth was to restore us to the joy we lost… His spirit
comes to us with the power to believe that joy is our birthright because the
Lord has made this day for us.” Lewis
doesn’t explain away pain or deny that life is hard and bad things happen. Instead he helps us move past the present
situation, be open to God and that the certainty that the things are, somehow
fundamentally right. Kay Warren, in her
book “Choose Joy; Because Happiness Isn’t Enough,” said, “Joy is the settled
assurance that God is in control of all the details of my life, the quiet
confidence that ultimately everything is going to be all right, and the
determined choice to praise God in all things.”
It’s clear that God created us to be joyful. God gives us free will; we have the power to
choose.
The
bible tells in Romans 12:12 to be joyful in hope, patient in affliction and
faithful in prayer. How do you bridge
the gap of what the bible tells us to do and how we feel? Knowing that joy is a choice, the level of
joy we experience is also a choice. Joy
is not dependent on what other people do or don’t do. It’s not about what we do for a job or don’t
do. We can’t withhold joy because of
pain, fear, disappointment, sadness or grief.
It became very clear to me that at the end of the day, or the end of a
long business trip, the amount of joy we experience is directly related to the
amount of joy we choose to experience.
We are in charge. I can choose to
let the stress of the situation ruin my joy or I can choose differently.
It’s
hard to think of people who are genuinely always joyful. It’s almost human nature to wallow in that
space at the opposite side of joy. Overly
joyful people, in my opinion, can be annoying if it’s not genuine. True God given joy comes from the soul. It’s a choice to give praise to God. True joy is a conviction about God, knowing
everything happens for a reason. True
joy is a quiet confidence in God, believing all things work together for our
good. It’s not turning a blind eye to
the bad things but holding on to the tight belief that everything truly is
going to be okay. John Eldredge says,
“The story of your life is the story of a long and brutal assault on your heart
by the one who knows what you could be and fears it.”
Dennis
Prager wrote a book called, “Happiness Is a Serious Problem; A Human Nature
Repair Manual.” He feels that happiness
is actually an obligation that we owe those in our lives. He says that to be happy we often have to
fight against our nature. Dennis
explains that often it’s our expectations that lead us to our unhappiness. If we want something that doesn’t happen we
may feel let down, sad or depressed if it doesn’t happen. Although Dennis says to let go of all
expectations, I feel that if we keep focused on the belief that all things work
together for God’s good, then we will be able to accept the outcome of wishes
unfulfilled. God always has something
better in store for you. Move forward
in faith and belief that if something did not happen, it was meant to be that
way.
Henri
J.M. Nouwen says, “Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it
every day.” How do you find joy when
everything around you defies it? I think
it’s really a skill to find it. It’s a
survival skill to find joy and hope when we’re faced with hard times. If it’s a skill then I think it’s something
we need to practice now, so when we’re in the midst of troubles we can find the
joy. Jesus promised we would see tribulations and troubles, but he also said we
should “Be happy about it! Be very glad!
For a great reward awaits you in heaven.” Mathew 5 12. This week I tried to choose
joy when I easily could have wallowed in the opposite.
This
past week I also heard a dear loved one is truly suffering from anxiety and
depression. It's gotten so bad that it's impacted every area of their
life. My loved one sought medical attention for it's truly a chemical
imbalance and now they wait for the medication to heal their mind as
they fight to piece together the broken areas of their life. Choosing
joy is impossible in the depths of that kind of despair but I have to
believe that holding onto the faith that everything happens for a
reason will help heal. Holding on to the trust that someday you will understand the good that can come out of a painful situation will help you overcome. Holding onto the promise that God's got your back will help you eventually choose joy.
The
flight finally boarded to make my way home from New York. It was one of those overbooked flights. I was in the very back of the plane, second
row from the very back, to be exact. It
was warm, it was smelly, and we were packed in there like sardines. You get the picture. We finally landed late in the evening. It’s quite easy to lose your mind watching people, ever so slowly, fumble with
their luggage making their way off of the plane. I thought back to the sweet woman cleaning the
restroom at the JFK
airport, in terminal 2, around the corner from gate 65 and, to my own surprise, I started to hum. That’s
when it hit me. I can either be
frustrated at my current exhausted situation in this exact moment or I can
simply choose to hum.
“There is a song in you whose melody is divinely
inspired.
Be still, listen to it and
begin to hum the joy that you are.”
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