Joy

I went to a lovely event last night that a friend invited me to. This is the second lovely event I was invited to this week, and I have to say I’m enjoying the parties. I work long hours in my job, and it’s not an easy job. When I first started all I could do was go to work and go home, and I was bringing work home all the time. It’s been like that for a long while now, and I have to be honest and say I do complain to God sometimes. I love the work that I do but it can be exhausting, and when it’s stressful on top of that as it has been lately it can be difficult to keep going. I told my friend who invited me to the event last night that parties like that feel like God is smiling on us, telling us, “Well done good and faithful servant.” (Matthew 25:21) I hope that is what He is saying, and I hope that He keeps on saying it. As much as I get exhausted and stressed, I do want to do what He has asked me to do.

In John chapter 6, Jesus feeds 5,000 men, not including women and children, with five barley loaves and two fish that a little boy gives to Him. After that, a crowd of people follow Him, chasing after Him by boat. This is the same chapter where He walks on water, too. In John 6:25 we read, “When they found Him on the other side of the lake, they asked Him, Rabbi, when did you get here?” His answer is not what they were expecting, which is very often the case with God. “Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw the signs I performed, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on Him, God the Father has placed His seal of approval.’ Then they asked Him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’ Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the One He has sent.’”

I don’t know about you, but see a couple of ouch moments in that exchange. The people are rushing all over to find Jesus, finally finding Him on the other side of a lake, and when they ask Him when He got there, He answers them with what sounds to me like a gentle rebuke. To me it sounds like He is basically saying, ‘You only care about where I am because you are filled with food when you are with me. I want to give you so much more!’ I don’t want to be talking for God, but that’s what I hear when I read that. Then they ask Him what they need to do to do the works that God requires – basically asking what they need to do in order to please God, and He answers, believe in Me. They're looking for a way to show that they are doing the work of God, but He's answering that the work of God is something much deeper than that.

God is always a combination of very simple and very profound. He uses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. (1 Corinthians 1:27). There are times when we are asking Him to answer a question or answer a prayer, and He does it in a way that sometimes we don’t understand because it seems too simple, or it comes in a way that we are not able to recognize because we’re looking for all kinds of bells and whistles. The way to please God is to believe in Jesus? But that’s too easy. Ah, but is it? We can say we believe, but do we really? We can say we will follow Him, but will we?

I know a woman who really drives me nuts. She is so negative all the time that she can spoil any good feeling with her negative comments. It’s like she walks around with a black cloud over her and she just wants to rain on everyone else’s parade. But one day when I was being really driven nuts by her, I saw her give money to a nearly passed out young man on the street. He was either drunk or high and looked like he’d been sleeping in the doorway he was in for days if not weeks. She didn’t think twice about it though, and she didn't judge him, she just handed him some money, from her heart. It made me feel ashamed that she drives me so crazy. We all have our issues, and mine are no better or worse than anyone else’s, so who am I to look at her and judge? So what if she’s negative – who knows what kind of life she’s had. Instead of wishing she’d go away, I need to start thinking of her with love and compassion and start praying for her that whatever has given her so much sadness will be released and that she will be filled with the love of God just as she is pouring out what little she has for others, so that her pain can be replaced by His joy.

At the event last night I saw someone who reminded me of the life I used to live. He is someone I know from my new life, but I had seen a picture of him a few weeks ago from another event, standing in a group with a man I used to love. They don’t know each other at all as far as I know, they just happened to be at the same event receiving awards for their respective organizations. The juxtaposition of the man I used to know and the one I know now in my new life was odd to me at the time when I saw it, and funny in its own way because they don’t know each other, but I know both of them, and they know me in very different ways from very different times in my life. So I was thinking about this strange juxtaposition, and then on my way home I walked through the area near where I spent so many years, some of them when I was in love with this same man. All at once it came over me that I was not in love with him any more and I didn’t remember why I ever was. It was such a liberating feeling. There was a time right after I was born again that I asked the Lord to take the pain of loving this man out of my heart and He did, but even though I haven’t felt that pain, I hadn’t really thought about whether or not I could love him again. On my way home last night, as I walked through a light rain that was falling, I knew that even if I literally bumped into him on the street, I wouldn’t care at all. If you only knew the depths of my despair when he betrayed me and deserted me at a time when I needed him the most, if you only knew how badly he had used my love and broken my heart, if you only knew how I did not want to live any more, you would understand how miraculous that really is. All the pain and all the hurt had been replaced by joy.

Right before I met that man, I was cast in a play that was a modern day version of the Abraham and Isaac story. I was Sarah, and I was cast because the playwright and director loved the way that I laughed. Sarah’s laugh is a history maker – when the Lord tells her she is going to have a child at age 90 when she has been barren all of her life, she laughs because she doesn’t believe God. I wasn’t 90 in the play – it was a modern day reworking of the story and I was my own age, somewhere around 37 at the time. I didn’t know a thing about the Bible or about that story, and when I did research I didn’t even think of reading the Bible itself, something that still astonishes me now. If I was doing research for any other play I would have always read the source material. But over the years I had done several plays based on Biblical stories and not once had I bothered to read the original. Now that’s foolish, but thank God He uses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.

I met a man last year who made me laugh, and the Lord spoke a word to me then. He gave me Isaiah 54, “Sing barren woman, you who never bore a child; burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labor; because more are the children of a desolate woman than of her who has a husband, says the Lord. Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities. Do not be afraid, you will not be put to shame. Do not fear disgrace, you will not be humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth, and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood.” (verses 1-4). He gave me Isaiah 54 in its entirety that day, but He focused that day on those verses.

He has unfolded more from that chapter over time, but those verses that were the foundation of His promise to me last Spring came back to me last night as I walked to the home where I now live. I heard a woman talking on her cell phone, and she said, “I went from living in a closet to where I am now,” and the Lord spoke those verses to me again and said that it could happen overnight.

Sometimes we are thinking that the blessing is too long in coming, that maybe it won’t come at all, sometimes like Sarah we just laugh because it seems that it couldn’t really happen to us. But there is an expression I’ve heard and that was another way that God confirmed His word to me, by having me hear it again and again, “God said it, I believe it, and that’s all there is to it.” If He said it, He’ll do it, and we can laugh or cry or agree and believe or not – if He said it, it will happen.

When I met the man who made me laugh, I was so very surprised to feel what I was feeling. I had laughed in the years since I was born again and had joyful times many times, but this laughter came from a different place, a place of surprise, a place of unexpected joy. When I told a woman I know about the word that God had given me, she said that when she heard it she thought about the tent pegs of my heart – that God was telling me it was all right to open up my heart again and expand my ability to love.

As I walked home last night I was realizing that without my even knowing how or when He did it, the Lord had given me a completely new life. No longer was I Sarah, the woman who was barren, I was a woman who could shout for joy. No longer did I remember the shame of being forsaken, no longer did I feel the pain and shame of those years ago. I may still live in a small apartment, but it's a lovely one and where I live could change any day, and I know that when it does, it will be in God’s perfect timing. I’ve worked with so many children and teens and youth over the years, and I know that I will be working with so many more. I work with adults, too, who sometimes tell me that I am like a mother to them, sometimes the only mother they have known. I have many children now, from many generations, and my tent pegs have expanded, and I can laugh, not in disbelief but in joy.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan