Joy. This word has been on my heart since I went on medical leave from school almost three months ago. What is joy? What makes it different from happiness? How do you get it?
These questions have all been partially answered in different ways, but in a big way through praying the Joyful Mysteries of the rosaries. While praying, I've noticed something: as joyful as these mysteries are, there's also sorrow in them, especially the fourth and fifth mysteries.
Joy is accompanied by sorrow.
My sister told me that she liked to pray about how Mary felt after Jesus went missing in the Temple. Ya'll... she literally lost God. She didn't know where He was.
She felt the same way we feel when we feel like God isn't there.
And she searched, and she searched, and she worried, and joy prevailed.
Years before, when she and Joseph presented the baby Jesus at the Temple, Simeon told her that her heart would be pierced by a sword. Mary must have felt so frightened, so troubled by this news. But yet, this event in Jesus' life is not seen as sorrowful, rather as joyful.
In our own lives, there are times when life is just so freaking unfair. Everything seems to be going wrong. We could be the young girl who is given news that could have her killed and shunned from society, or the girl who can't find a place to rest and give birth, and so she delivers her son among animals. These are troubling things. But Mary is an example to us: she chose the joy in these events rather than the sorrowful and troubling.
Will you choose the joyful? It has to be a conscious decision. There will be times when we're going to have to search high and low for it.
But it's there.
We just have to stop staring at the shadows and look to the sun behind them.
