Though my husband and I have always been a bit intense, we’ve also known how to laugh and enjoy life—until five years ago when we faced multiple tragedies, including the sudden death of Christopher’s mother from pancreatic cancer. We felt crushed, confused, and joyless. After one particularly somber week, I felt inspired by the Lord to figure out how to get our joy back.
As the two of us pressed in, we discovered something: the joy of the Lord is one of the most dynamic forces available to us. It has the power to turn our mourning into dancing, our despair into hope, and our fear into faith. This joy is a by-product of our spiritual transformation as well as an essential component of the process.
In marriage, joy functions like engine oil. It reduces relational friction, which not only helps us uphold our commitment but also rejoice in it. Joy runs deeper than happiness because it has the capacity to transcend the details of our lives. Author Margaret Feinberg explains in Fight Back with Joy, “The Bible insists that joy is more than a feeling; it’s an action. We don’t just sense joy; we embody it by how we respond to the circumstances before us.”
To read the remainder of this post, please click this link to Biola Center for Marriage and Relationships.
Or, you can read an entire chapter on joy in my book, Making Marriage Beautiful.