Joy.

"It takes time to be funny. It takes time to extract the JOY from life."

[Music - Simon & Garfunkel]

I get super-creative blog ideas whenever I have to write a paper. That is actually not the case right now. But it did just occur to me as often being the case.

OK, so I have been mad-crazy in the mood to watch Elizabethtown for about three weeks now. Only I can't find it in this frozen town. AAARRRRRGGGHHHH. I love that movie so much. Katie Powell and I both realized that it's in our top ten favourite movies ever. I feel like it's one of those that is either in your top ten or you hate it. There's no "on the fence" for this one. (I mean, that's a generalization, but generally speaking . . . .) Someone who fell in the second category recently asked me how I could love it so much. I thought good and hard about it for five minutes and decided that I love it because it's about deep human suffering -- but pushing through that suffering to find the life that exists deep down through at the bottom of it. (To use an image from the film itself: like a single green vine pushing through cement.) It's about surviving. It’s about joy. Real joy, that is deep and profound because it springs from brokenness.

And this concept has been something I've been mulling over for the past week or so. Mom sent me a package in the mail last week that was full of delightful things: a "Who Dat Nation" t-shirt, four Mardi Gras masks, and Champagne for the Soul: Celebrating God's Gift of Joy by Mike Mason. That book is slowly affirming and transforming my ideas of God's purpose for His children. I have always suspected, hoped - and now have a real rationale behind it - that life is about joy. And I'm pretty sure now that it is. It's wonderfully packed with astounding statements like "Why not be happy all the time?" but also "Joy loves our brokenness best." Joy is real and deep and only becomes realer and deeper the more closely you fight for it in sadness.

I got an eight-page letter from Sarah today (we both like writing and each other more than almost anything else in the world -- thus, our correspondence requires that we overdo ourselves) and she wrote this quote from the book:

"Joy may seem an upbeat sort of feeling, but the direction of joy isn't always up. Often to be joyful we must go down -- down through the noise of racing thoughts, down through the swirling chaos of circumstances, down through the deceptive appearances of life, down into the still waters and green pastures at the heart's core."

Or, as Claire from Elizabethtown would say: "I want you to get into the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that's happened."

But also: "Make time to dance alone with one hand waving free!"