Joyful, Joyful

"Joyful, Joyful we adore Thee, God of glory Lord of Love"

This describes me lately. I feel like I'm just overflowing with joy. My life feels so complete and whole. I feel like I want to erupt with joy "lava" and spew it all over everyone I meet. I love the man I'm married to and I love my three children.

But today something hit me as I was thinking about how complete and full of joy my life is right now. Why was I not this full of joy before? Seriously, the Bible tells us to be joyful in all things. We are to be content where God has us at all times, even when we think we should be somewhere else.

I'm gonna be honest, I'm a bit ashamed of myself that I only let the Joy of the Lord truly come into my life after God gave me "what I wanted". Don't get me wrong, I still should be thankful that God even did this for me. But why in the world did He give me, someone who wasn't truly content where he had me before, the desires of my heart?

He should have sat back and said, "silly, child, you aren't even happy with the things I gave you, why should I give you more?" But because I serve a God of Grace and Mercy, He instead said, "I love you my child with an everlasting love. I have seen the desires of your heart, and as your daddy in heaven I want to see you with those desires."

I am going to choose from this day on, to be joyful, even if I don't always feel like I'm where I want to be. Because if God can still give wonderful gift to an ungrateful person like me, then I can show Him that I will be content where He has me.

For example, I'll be honest, I am not really fond of the town I live in. I've wanted to move for quite a few years now, but God keeps saying no to us. We have a few people we get a long with, but I'll be honest, we don't feel we are truly accepted here. We don't fit into the cliques that exist here. I guess this is a good thing, because most of them get along for reasons we don't want to belong to them. It's just tough not having many people to do things with.

But I can choose at this point to be joyful because God gave me a house to live in and food to eat as well as many other things. Or I can wallow in self-pity and depression because I didn't get what I want. Maybe God's just waiting for me to be truly content where He has me. Or maybe, just maybe, we have a purpose here that just hasn't been fulfilled yet.

I will choose to have joy. Who knows, maybe because we don't fit in very well, we can be an example to some that we know how to have fun without living all the "earthly" ways.

"Joyful, Joyful, we adore Thee. God of glory, Lord of Love"