“I keep my eyes always on the Lord. With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure… You will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” Psalms 16:8-11 NIV
TICKLING THE IVORIES
In the midst of distasteful surroundings, events. Beyond successful efforts, productivity. The fruit of the spirit is joy.
In the awareness of God. On holy ground, bowed heart. The posture to receive joy.
Upon learning that this month’s theme is joy, I immediately knew that I wanted to reflect and write about joy in the presence of interactions that we have with others. Whether it is in the exuberant celebration of a birth, a wedding, or a life, or the quieter enjoyment of being in companionship with others, joy is most present when we are surrounded by those we care about.
Something that I also realized though, is the joy that can occur within oneself when we witness joy in others. For the majority of us who write here on AAWOL, we are in the helping profession, serving community, congregation, or a collective of some sort. As a mental health therapist there are many pivotal moments that I am present for in my clients’ lives; they come to new insight or realization, and gleefully share with me how this has helped them view their past, present, or their future in a brand new way. Although clients may be thanking me for helping them, the feeling that I experience isn’t pride in my work, but rather a joy to witness someone who had previously been struggling, being at peace or acceptance with whatever revelation they arrived at.
In thy presence is the fulness of joy… Psalm 16:11
Did you know that joy is a gift from God? It is something that is not pursued, but it is understood as God intended for us, His people, to have His joy. As we look at the gifts of the Spirit in Galatians, we learn that these are also called the fruit of the Spirit. Fruit is the product or the result when a person receives and uses these gifts in their lives to better live as God designed, and more importantly to share with others in community.
The uniqueness of gift-giving is important to understand how much God loves us and wants to provide Himself to us not just once, but daily. For example, when you receive a gift, one reaction is to ponder, What in the world is this gift? Those who do not have an inquisitive spirit will put the gift aside and not pursue the gift further. But in the context of my Asian American family context, opening gifts among family benefits the group. Most likely someone will ask “where are the directions?” in an immediate desire to put the gift to use. We have countless hours, after the thank you’s are written, to try it out and make it work its purpose.
From Desolation . . . to Joy! Together, these four words sum up the Easter story. From the darkness and desolation of Good Friday to the light and joy of Resurrection Sunday. From the anguish and misery of Jesus’ suffering on the cross to his ultimate triumph over sin and suffering and death.
“From Desolation . . . to Joy” is also a fitting title for Psalm 22. The psalm begins with words of lament: “My God, my God, Why have you abandoned me? You seem far from saving me, far away from my groans” (v. 1).
Psalm 22 and many other psalms in the Bible are subtitled “A Psalm of David.” The subtitle means that these psalms were either written by David — the shepherd who became a king — or they were written in the spirit of David, out of David’s life circumstances, when he felt threatened by enemies, when his life was in danger.
Over the years, my understanding of love has gone through several revisions. From experiencing love from my parents, siblings and extended family as a child to a place where I have had to examine and revisit my love for my husband, my children, my extended family, friends, the church and God, again and again. Suffice to say, I have begun to see love as more than an emotion. Today, love for me is more like a teacher, or maybe a sculptor, and maybe, it is the Advocate Jesus was talking about in his farewell discourse with his disciples.
The call to love as a spiritual discipline and an act of faith is embedded in all of Jesus’ life and teachings. In many ways, my faith walk has been all about unlearning and learning what love entails. In the process, I have wrestled a great deal with my own motives and priorities when it comes to understanding genuine love, which has meant letting go of my own imaginations of love and being fully present in the moment with someone where they are. It is the stuff of incarnational love, the kind that changes you. I suspect, Paul had to do a lot of unlearning to come to the place where he could pen that glorious description of love in 1 Corinthians 13. That kind of love does not come easy nor is it discovered in all its fullness in some corner of my heart. It is nothing short of cultivation that calls for intentionality, practice, discipline, courage, and hope that I and the other in all my relationships are being cared for and changed in the hands of a loving God.
Among all of Jesus’ teachings, probably one of the most challenging sayings to follow is “love your enemies.” Recently, the term, “non-complementary behavior” helped me to understand what it might mean to love my enemies. The term was first coined by a psychologist from Eastern Michigan University, Christopher Hopwood. Our behaviors are usually complementary: when someone approaches us with a broad smile and kind words, we tend to do the same toward that person. On the other hand, if someone is hostile toward us, we instinctively react likewise. But it’s when we act in a non-complementary way, an unexpected way, it completely shakes up the other person and produces a different outcome.
It’s like this — if an animal is biting you, what should you do? Your instinct is to pull away. But if you do pull away, you’ll be really hurt. The way to get out of a bite is to FEED the bite— this means act counterintuitively and push into the bite. When you do so, you loosen the jaw and then you’ll be able to pull away without further harm. (I just hope that the animal is a squirrel or a chipmunk and not a lion or a tiger…)
TJ, now 15 months old, triggers memories of my earliest AAWOL blog, written when he was just born. Back then, I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming flood of motherly love or the fear of missing out on his growth. Each passing day, week, and month reveals subtle changes in him. My parents-in-law often reassure me, “Just wait, kids only get cuter.” Skeptical at first, I now understand what they meant as I witness TJ’s development. The once helpless baby now grasps more of his surroundings and communicates without words, leaving me in awe of God’s intricate design even in infancy. I am humbled and embarrassed by how much I underestimated how God created human development, even in babies. At the same time, I am relearning so much about life and simple relationships that are correlated with love.
In recent years, I heard a preacher emphasizing to his congregation that the fruit of the spirit is singular, not plural fruits. In a way, there is also a sense of making all of the characteristics of the fruit of the spirit equal in weight without a particular order. As I experience God and watch how my son responds to our love for him, I strongly believe Apostle Paul deliberately lists out the fruit of the spirit in that order, and maybe just as he mentioned in 1 Corinthians, the greatest of faith, hope, love — love being the greatest of them all. Among the fruit of the spirit, though all represent God and his manifestation through us, love is the first and foremost, foundational aspect of who God is. As a result, the first overflowing characteristic of followers of Jesus would be love. And love can be found as the baseline for all the following lists of the fruit of the Spirit.
Just like we courageously journey to label the deeply personal core messages about ourselves in pain, we also journey to discover the deeply personal corrective truths about our identity. And just like our pain messages are scattered throughout our past, our corrective truths are also scattered within our already-lived lives. Contrary to what we may have learned about only looking outwards and upwards to find a sense of love, we can also look into and back at our messy, earthly realities to find the same answer.
In therapeutic treatment, this looks like asking questions like:
“Growing up, in the midst of all these violations of love, who and where did you go to for comfort?”
“When you look at your life, where did you experience the exception to your primary pain message?”
“When did you know you were truly loved, worthy, cherished, and significant?”
My work as a therapist is anchored in the modality of Restoration Therapy, where I conceptualize each client’s story in two organizing camps: love and safety. Here, I will only focus on this first camp, love. In my conceptualizing, the love each client did or did not experience throughout their lives, especially in their formative years, informs their basic identity. This basic identity is best expressed in terms of uniqueness, worthiness, and desirability. When a person experiences violations in the camp of love, they hold a wounded sense of identity.
In treatment, I walk alongside clients as they explore the violations of love that have informed their wounded identity. More than just emotions (mad, bad, glad, sad), I help clients understand the primary messages to their identity that they thematically act upon, even if unconscious. Primary messages are those “I am” statements about ourselves that surface in pain. Here are some examples: “I am…unloved, unworthy, insignificant, alone, worthless, inadequate, unacceptable, unwanted, defective, not measuring up.”
The Kingdom of God — what can I say or write about this that hasn’t already been written and said? And yet, it has been at the center of why being a Christian means so much to me.
Having been raised in a Korean immigrant church, North American evangelical teachings shaped my theological lens through an emphasis on personal piety — individual salvation from my sins through the sacrifice of Jesus. While I never stopped believing in the necessity of that part of the gospel, in my 30’s I hit a wall in which I couldn’t connect to why it mattered. What I didn’t understand then is that this gospel for my own individual soul felt hollow because it was not the whole gospel. Jesus’s gospel about the Kingdom of God being at hand included more than just my salvation from sin.
The views, actions, and affiliations of guests invited to write for this blog do not always reflect ISAAC’S official stances; they belong to the guests. This blog is a platform for voices to be shared and perspectives to be discussed.
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