The Difference Between Joy & Happiness
The Joy of the Lord is My Strength
I remember the first time I heard someone explain to me the difference between joy and happiness. Mark Olson was the director of Spring Hill Camp, where I was a camp counselor during my high school years. At a staff training, he explained that happiness is based on our circumstances and our feelings about them; thus, happiness is necessarily dependent on our circumstances. Happiness, then, is different from joy in that joy is a permanent grace-gift from God.
I remember, too, at Trinity Methodist Church, where my early faith was nurtured, singing the Sunday School song… “The joy of the Looooorrrrdddd is my strength, the joy of the Loooorrrrd is my strength, the JOY of the LOOOOORRRRDD is my strength, the joy of the Lord is my strength.”
Joy took on new meaning for me, however, through my exposure to two quotes, the experience of intense personal suffering, and the context of a popular scripture text that includes the concept of joy. The first of two quotes is actually the title of C.S. Lewis’s autobiography, “Surprised by Joy,” which tells the story of how God revealed His steadfast love to a hardened, prim-n-proper Englishman scholar. The second quote is one from the 14th-century saint Julian of Norwich, who reflects on joy in the face of Jesus and declares that all humans are invited and called by grace to “take possession of our birthright of never-ending joy.”
Carrying with me these two quotes became a different thing entirely to carry around when suffering (including my parent’s untimely deaths) came to me in ways that were not only shattering emotionally but also shattering to my faith and, in particular, to its oftentimes shoddy assumptions about what it means that God is both loving and powerful, while looking directly at the reality of life as it is and not as I wish it were.
A few months ago, I came across a familiar text in preparation for a normal Sunday Lord’s Day eucharist, Nehemiah 8:10c, which states, “the joy of the Lord is my strength.” Kind of pithy, fun, and simple. It’s a saying that we can put on our walls, right next to the “Live, Laugh, Love” placard. What happens, then, when hell is unleashed, and the reality of a true life that is peppered with the inexplicable and painful and is no longer mostly a theoretical idea and is, rather, in full color a present lived experience?
In teaching the Bible for my career time and again, I’ve found ways to help disciples of Christ understand that the Bible is not a collection of sayings that we can pull out of context, but rather it is one narrative of God’s pursuit of His self-and-others-destrutive creation. I, too, need to be continually reminded of this fact about biblical wisdom, and reading Nehemiah 8:10c, even in its most proximate context, is not only helpful but transformative:
Nehemiah 8:9b-10,
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law. Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
The “joy of the Lord” promise is stated at the end of a 70-plus-year nightmare at the tail end, chronologically, of what we call the Old Testament. All of the prophetic and historical books in your Old Testament tell the story of God’s establishment of His reign and its eventual and systematic destruction soon after its establishment. The southern Kingdom, Judah, unlike the northern Kingdom, Israel, survived in part, and in phases, groups of exiles returned to their homeland, and with Nehemiah, they came to the day when the temple was rebuilt enough to dedicate it. And God’s people wept. Memories flooding their minds of hundreds and thousands of family and friends mercilessly murdered, seventy years of forced exile from their homeland, stripped of any significant semblance of personal agency.
There, in the deepest darknesses of despair, regret, guilt, shame, and fear, God’s Word is spoken over them, and they weep. It is a lot easier to just slap a “joy of the Lord is my strength” on the wall and slap on a smile. The reality of life, however, invites us to encounter the God of the universe, who promises something we call joy that is not dependent on circumstances but rather on the character of the Creator Himself.