LAKE FOREST, Calif. (WordNews.org) July 7, 2012 – There may be bubbly people by nature, but that doesn’t mean they are more joyful.
Kay Warren, the wife of Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren, said she knows what it’s like to be married to a “Tigger” type of person, that bouncy-type of personality.
Warren, author of “Choose Joy,” told WordNews.org that she’s struggled with depression.
But one’s natural personality isn’t enough to either bring joy or deter someone from having joy, she said.
“I think there’s even a myth that the Tiggers of life are the ones that experience joy,” she said. “You can be happy and you can have a naturally upbeat temperament and still try to dig your own wells in tough times.”
[For more on Warren’s take in digging wells]
“It doesn’t mean that joy automatically comes to the more extraverted, glass-half-full kind of people,” Warren said. “It may be easier for them to access joy but they still have to choose it because it goes far beyond our personalities.”
The fact is, she said, our personalities aren’t enough to carry us through life’s daily struggles.
“Our personalities are pretty fragile and our personalities aren’t adequate,” Warren said. “They actually become one of those broken cisterns.”
[For more on Warren’s take on cisterns]
“It [our personalities] can hold water for awhile, but it can’t hold water forever,” she said. “There has to be something beyond our personalities for our hopes for joy.”
Warren said she wasn’t following through on what she’d learned in a study she’d done 15 years ago on joy
“I completely laid aside the idea that I could choose it. I read it, I studied it, I taught it. But I wasn’t practicing it,” she said. “And I had let external circumstances and my own natural glass-half-empty personality take over and I had stopped understanding, I had stopped practicing what I read about choosing it.”
So many take on the role of victim rather than victor.
“As long as we think it has to do with the externals, then we’re victims and it’s only the people who have the best of circumstances all the time who can choose joy,” Warren said.
That’s a conclusion she doesn’t buy, because that’s allow for personal responsibility.
“I need to take personal responsibility and to realize at the end of literally every day how much joy I experienced on that day was completely up to me,” she said. “That removes the ‘poor me’ syndrome. It removes the victim syndrome. It removes the lens in which you look enviously at the lives of other people instead of putting it right back on where it needs to be: God is the same. God has never changed. And if joy is found in Him, then I can still find it today, no matter what’s going on in my life.”
Come back next Saturday for the next installment.
Related:
Park 1: ‘Choose Joy-Because Happiness Isn’t Enough’
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