Last thoughts on 'Joy'

With LENT about to finish….. and Easter just around the corner it is a good time to reflect on how we are doing on living a JOY-FILLED life and the 5 keys to achieving that…… Key no 3 was BE CONTENT…. maybe one of the hardest to manage as to do this often means being able to WAIT.  I wonder how good we are at WAITING?  Apparently we Brits are famous as a nation for our willingness to WAIT in a queue but only work to the Rule of 6 (According to a recent study by University College London). We will averagely only WAIT 6 minutes in a queue before giving up.  We are unlikely to join a queue with more than 6 people in it and 6 inches is the minimum amount of personal space necessary for us to avoid stress and anxiety! 

Bryan D McClaren (author of The Great Spiritual Migration) believes that the Christian faith was born on a weekend between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  He defines Good Friday as being about a painful death, a ‘letting go’; Easter Saturday representing a silence, a pause, a ‘letting be’ a WAITING and  Easter Sunday  a rising up, a travelling lighter, a fresh understanding, a movement from ‘organised religion’ to ‘organising religion for the common good!  A JOY-FILLED LIFE!! 

At a recent family gathering I was amused to hear that one part of the family, who had travelled down from the Midlands with their two small children, had tried an experiment with allowing them to be bored!  Rather than laying on in-house entertainment they had let them have no distractions apart from what they could think of themselves!  It had been an interesting experiment apparently but they were definitely planning to give them a film to watch on their way home!!  A recent study came to the conclusion that boredom is indeed good for our children and indeed for us too.  We feel so driven to provide entertainment and structured activities that we lose sight of the fact that this can be counter productive.  What our children and indeed ourselves need is “to encounter and engage with the raw stuff that life is made of which includes ‘unstructured time’”. 

Let’s allow ourselves some unstructured time this Easter to

let go

let be

and rise up

engaging fully with the JOY that comes bubbling up from inside as we grasp the significance of the events of that 1st Easter weekend when the Christian faith was born!

In the words of Jesus on the night before he died 

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you…

Obey my commands (to love God and other people)

and you will remain in my love….. I have told you this so that my JOY may be in you and that your JOY may be complete”

Have a blessed and joyful Easter!