Who Wants More Joy?

Most would agree that we all want, maybe even need, more joy in our lives.  No surprise then that the peddlers of joy abound, as do the suckers like the yours truly who fall for their slick marketing and the promise of an easy kill. 

Part of me feels I should know better. That fullness of joy is a bonus, a side-benefit of our relationship with Christ, and should not be pursued as an end in itself. That there is a vast difference between genuine joy and a cheap knock-off.  That separated from the relationship, our desire for joy easily corrupts into joy-lust...

Being the cerebral type that I am, when something baffles me, I go to my library.  Since English is my second language, I have tomes of dictionaries of all kinds. And it’s never too much trouble to get up and look up words, even the familiar ones (not everybody in our household shares this opinion!).  

The other day, as I was chewing on this joy-conundrum, I got the Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words off the shelf and looked up  JOY.

We just came off a joyful season of celebrating  the birth of Christ.  There were undeniable moments of joy. There was the passing store-bought happiness But, now we are in frigid January, and all joy seems frozen in the past  and what is left behind is a lingering question begging for an answer:

Is there…anything else… Is there something… more? Something  that I am missing?

I. read the dictionary description and the meaning, scan over the references. And then, tucked in a note under the third definition I stumble upon the following sentence:

Experiences of sorrow prepare for, and enlarge, the capacity for joy.

I zoom back to the beginning of the sentence and read it again, this time slowly:                                                             

Experiences of sorrow…

Prepare us for…and...

Enlarge our…

Capacity for Joy.