LAKE FOREST, Calif. (WordNews.org) July 28, 2012 – Since writing “Choose Joy,” author Kay Warren has taken to ask questions to her audience.
It goes something like this:
“How many of you can name two people who live with joy?”
It’s not a rhetorical question, Warren told WordNews.org.
“Almost every hand goes up–automatically,” she said.
It gets worse from here, though.
“I challenge them and say, ‘You may or may not know two people who live with joy. Can you name 10 people you would say live with joy?”
This time, 75 percent of the hands drop.
“Then I say, ‘How many of you can name 25 people who live with job.’”
Warren, wife of Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren, said at this last question, not a single hand remains in the air.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “What’s wrong with us? Why can’t all of us name 25 people who live with joy? If joy is our birthright—it is one of the fruit of the spirit, it’s what God says is ours, James says ‘Consider it all joy when trials and troubles come your way, the Apostle Paul says ‘rejoice always,’ Jesus said, ‘My joy will be in you’—if all that is true, why can’t we name 25 people who live with joy?”
The test of each audience is both disappointment and somewhat encouraging.
“I’m not the only one who is struggling. I’m not the only one who is missing out,” Warren said. “I wasn’t the only one who was experiencing this gap between what the Bible seems to say and what our lives are really like.”
But Warren doesn’t want people to remain in this place, because she has found a true joy.
“I’m actually very hopeful that if somebody like me, who has struggled with depression, who has really had those moments of existential angst of ‘this is all just meaningless and there’s nothing here,’—if I can choose joy on a daily basis, than I feel it’s within reach of every other person.”
And the reward isn’t just eternal.
“The ting that gives me the most satisfaction at this moment is knowing that my family looks at me and says, ‘Mom, you’re changing.’ And so it’s not just words on a page. It’s not just words in a Bible study,” Warren said. “It’s my family that is seeing me practice this and seeing me change. And that is like, ‘Yes!’”