HOW TO BE JOYOUS EVERY TIME (PART 2)
Joy
is a choice and you can choose to
live in it. Let us draw strength from these great lines penned down by Richelle E. Goodrich “The world seems to want us to be sad and angry because bad things
frequently happen. But I say we should feel the opposite. We should be happy
and cheerful because good things happen. We should be delighted to see the sun
rise and stars glow and rainbows color stormy skies. We should savor every
simple breath and eat each meal with gratitude. We should slumber in sweet
dreams and relish moments of laughter and love. We should take more notice of
the joys and kindnesses that do exist, still dictating actions of millions of
good people all over the world. Life is filled with pleasant moments, not just
grief. We should be happy because this is true.”
Secrets Of Making Joy a Habitual
Lifestyle (Continuation From Last Week)
Last
week we started a discussion on how we could be constantly joyous. We also shared
two of the secrets of how we can make joy a habitual lifestyle. This is the
concluding part.
(3) Gather
information on how to be joyous. The most fertile ground of joylessness is
ignorance. God created you to inhabit joy, to savor it. Therefore, refuse to be
conquered by the forces of sadness and despair. God laments that His people are
enslaved and destroyed for lack of knowledge. In Hosea 4:6 He says, “My people are destroyed for lack of
knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee,
that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy
God, I will also forget thy children.” God forbids this for us. But the truth
is that knowledge of joy is the permanent solution to captivity by sadness. There
is much information on joy, in the Bible, on the Net, in books, and all over
the place. Go for it.
(4)
Regularly engage in meditation on the
knowledge you gather. Let me share a deep truth about meditation that will
be very useful to you. For food to be useful to our bodies, it must go through
the processes of ingestion, digestion, absorption, and assimilation.
Ingestion
involves the taking in of food through the mouth, etc. Digestion involves the breaking down of complex food substances into
simpler and tinier food particles through mechanical
processes of chewing, grinding, churning, mixing with saliva, and chemical processes (such as the actions
of enzymes) so that they can be easily absorbed by the cell. Absorption is the uptake of fluids and
other food substances by the tissues of the body. This is the process by which
the digested food enters the blood stream. Assimilation
is the utilization of the absorbed food substances by the cells to generate
energy which the body uses.
In
the same way, information or knowledge, which is like raw food intake, can only
be useful to us after we break it down
into “simpler and tinier knowledge particles” through meditation. Meditation, deep thinking on something, is the mental chewing, emotional grinding,
and mixing of that information into a finer form that can be absorbed and
assimilated by our spirit, the real person
in us. Psalm 39:3 is proof that meditation changes knowledge into a form that
supplies us spiritual energy. This is how Bible
in Basic English puts it, “My heart was burning in my breast; while I was deep in thought (i.e.
meditating) the fire was lighted; then I said with my tongue.” When you
mediate on joy, for instance, your spirit will be able to absorb and assimilate
the “finer, simpler particles of the knowledge of joy”. This will culminate in the
ignition of fire in your spirit that will equip you with power to constantly feel
joy.
(5)
Focus on your vision or dream: Concentration is a great secret of strength. When you lose focus in
life you notice all kinds of distracting elements; when you focus on your
dreams you don’t see those disrupting influences. When disappointing
experiences tend to make you sad, fix your eyes on your ultimate vision.
Vision is joy
generator. When you imagine all that you stand to gain at the realization of
your vision, you can’t but be glad. Your vision is the joy set before you; it
empowers you to face challenges with courage and hope. For the joy that was set
before Jesus, (that is, salvation of mankind and His eventual enthronement), He
endured the cross and despised every shame. This is recorded in Hebrews 12:2.
(6)
Share love (good deeds) with others: If
you really want to be consistently thrilled, do good to people out of a heart
of love. Not only will it make you elated, it will also enlarge your joy. This
great thought by Robert Murray McCheyne is good food for thought: “Joy is
increased by spreading it to others.” Whenever you give a person a gift, a helping hand in cash or kind, a
word of comfort, an encouragement to start or enlarge a business, some
mentoring, or any good deed at all, you plant a seed of joy in that person.
Every seed planted multiples. A corn seed sowed in every good ground multiples into hundreds of corn seeds at harvest.
Some people are bad grounds; they’ll never appreciate you for whatever good you
do to them. If they have chance, they’ll reward you with evil. Let that not discourage
you to continue to do good and spread joy.
(7)
Habitually take relevant action. Nathaniel
Branden says that, "The
first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. The third
step is action." Action attacks fear and sadness. The path to
constant joy is deliberate massive action on your goals. If you change your actions your thoughts will follow because your actions are faster and easier to
change than thoughts.
Dr. Noam Shpancer wrote an online article
entitled, Action Creates Emotion, and
showed that research in clinical psychology proved that “the faster way to change an emotion is to change the behavior attached
to it.” He also related that depression, for instance, was a result of
inactivity. For example, after a number of failures and disappointments, people
stopped trying and withdrew from the world. Withdrawal and inactivity would then
decrease positive interactions, and therefore, increase inaction until it would
result in depression.
Therefore,
Dr. Shpancer advises that rather than respond to unpleasant experiences with
sadness and withdrawal, we should react to failure by learning to act more skillfully and purposefully so as to
reintroduce positive reinforcements into our life.
John Maxwell says that “Events are less important than
our responses to them.” Stephen Covey
puts the same thought this way, “It’s not what happens to us, but our response
to what happens to us that hurts us.”
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