glee...

Some moments of 'pure joy' are like this picture.

Spontaneous.

I'm sitting in the driveway, my wife and youngest girl-child are playing, she spins her in the air, her head comes back and guffawing ensues.

Daddy happens to have his camera nearby.

'snap'

A moment of pure joy.

But, of course (and you know this), not all of life is like that.  In fact most of life is the opposite of that.  If you were to count the number of hours you spend feeling down or depressed then divided that by the number of moments in which you can remember experiencing pure simple joy, chances are you'd get further depressed.

Unless you remember what I just remembered.

See, I'm renovating my back yard.  It's a huge job.  My muscles and brain and work-ethic are stretched and tired.  I find this kind of work to be almost pure drudgery and--to make matters worse--(as I've mentioned here before) I'm not especially 'good' at it, so that makes the process even more painful.

My remedy is to move slowly.

I just keep thinking, and measuring carefully, then I think some more and measure again, then I rough it in, then measure again, then think then measure then cut.

Needless to say I couldn't make a living doing this 'cause I'm just too dang slow.

But I find that allowing myself to move at a cautious non-stressed pace gives me the mental and spiritual head-space I need to not freak out and keep at it.

This, perhaps, is something for me (and maybe you) to keep in mind as we face those tough hours and days and weeks and months and years that make up our average ordinary lives. There's really no way to make it 'easier' so we have to find a way to get through it.

'Cause you know what?  Once my backyard it done my wife and I and our babies and our close friends and family are going to have some moments of pure joy out there in that newly minted backyard.  'Course we won't get to those fleeting moments unless I keep trudging my way slowly through the hard work of getting the thing 'done'.

This is relevant for storytellers because our stories tend to skip over the long stretches of hardship in the lives of our characters to focus on those significant 'up' or 'down' moments that make for good drama.  I think it's important to remember to lace the tales you tell with enough 'drudgerous reality' to keep the thing 'feeling' somewhat close to 'real'.  If it's all extremely 'up' or all extremely 'down' your audience is going to 'pop out' of your story just like they would in response to a VFX shot that didn't quite 'work'.

For the pulpit-masters reading my thought is that our sermons must reek of honesty.  We must not try to rush our way through the rough patches (in our life or in the text) because if we do we might lose that empathic ability to connect with our audience as they go through theirs.

And in your stories and in your sermons (and may it be that it might be in your lives as well...) be sure to fit in a moment or two of pure joy.

Because that's what keeps us going.

T