LAKE FOREST, Calif. (WordNews.org) May 11, 2012 – Kay Warren didn’t set out to write a book about joy.
“It started out for myself,” Warren told WordNews.org. “Then I taught a retreat on it.”
Warren, who is the wife of Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren, said 15 years ago she first taught a retreat on joy.
“”I had been asked to teach a summer Bible study at our church and so I dug out of my files this old study I had done 15 years ago and was struck by it and how much more I needed it,” she said, “and how much I hadn’t learned the first time around.”
At the summer Bible study, more than 5,000 women attended each week either in person or online.
“It struck a nerve and I realized I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand joy. I wasn’t the only Christian who wasn’t living with daily joy,” Warren said. “And from there it was, ‘Yeah, you know what? There may be 100 books on joy. There may be 500 books on joy. But somehow the message isn’t getting through and we’re missing it.’”
What she was missing she made as part of the book’s title.
“The biggest ‘aha’ was that I could choose it,” Warren said, “which is why I put that in the title. I had just settled into the idea that joy was something that happened to you. And that those who had a lot of externally great circumstances, things that happen to them,that they were the ones who could experience joy. Or that there were just certain people born that way.”
But those were faulty assumptions, she said.
“I discovered that it was entirely within my own reach,” she said. “That it was completely up to me. And that was amazing.”