Tuesday, June 28th 2022

Easier said than done.
With time, I have learned that joy is a choice I must make every day when I wake up. It is a struggle, especially when life tries so hard to show us its back and not its smiling face. Choosing joy to me is better than being happy, for happiness is not enough for me.

Today, one of my aunts texted me to ask for prayers. This is how she put it, “…ask God to give me peace of mind. Something is really disturbing me.” In response to her request, I pointed out to her that God gave us peace that the world cannot give, and no one can take it away. I also encouraged her to identify that “SOMETHING” bothering her, because with knowledge of that ‘something’, it will be easy to tell God what she really wants. She then opened up and said that “Someone hurt me, and they continue hurting me……. I have forgiven them, but they keep repeating the same act.”
…..Boom! We have the ‘something’ now and we can present it to God in prayer. I promised to help her talk to my Saint Friend Pio, and our conversation ended there.

Does that sound familiar to you? When something is bothering you and you sometimes don’t want to disclose it.

As I prayed for her and many others, I thought of the song by Christopher Martin which features Roman Virgo that reminds us that we should not let anyone steal our joy. Christopher Martin ft Roman Virgo Glow

The world is full of trials of all kinds. We are all battling one giant or another -spiritual, mental, emotional, even physical. We all know it. But the issue is, many of us walk along this sea of life with a gigantic spiritual blindfold over our faces, giving all our attention to what we have not received rather than being grateful for the little on our palms. Many times, we “Reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expect some other Good” – C.S Lewis.

Today I woke up in very high spirits and I cannot tell where it came from. I was feeling exactly the words of one of the popular children’s songs, “Jesus’ love is bubbling over” but to me, it was “His joy was bubbling over”.

I am convinced that joy and gratitude are very much intertwined. I can confidently say, joy is a branch that comes from the tree of gratitude. One cannot have a joyful heart without having a grateful heart. (Read that sentence again). And one cannot be grateful and not experience joy. It’s an electric energy that flows from one wire to the next. One who is joyful will find himself giving thanks to God continually even when nothing has happened. Joyful and grateful souls stick together like a ring and a ring finger.

One of the characteristics of joyful people is the ability to see beyond themselves and circumstances. The ability to understand and realize that what goes on internally is of greater importance than the temporary and making choices to be joyful rather than be happy for the moment.

When nothing seems to make sense, and nothing is meaningful, it is often the right moment to choose to be joyful; a time to be grateful for the goodness God has already put in our lives in the past. I pray for the grace to be joyful today. I choose to be joyful over being happy; for what makes us happy can be taken away, but what makes us joyful, no man can take it away because it goes beyond what one can see and touch.

Put on a big smile and choose Joy over Happiness today.