Joy and Peace

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him…” Ro 15:13

Hope, joy, and peace are something that we seek; yet we often try to find them in the wrong places. Many times we think we have found the right things, but they all have turned out to be mere counterfeits that teased us with their glamour and, without a single exception, they all disappointed us in the end.

All of us will get to a point in our lives when we become deluded in our desperate search for true joy and will resign ourselves to the fact that we will never find it. How many times did we think that we had found the right thing, yet it turned out to be a mere shadow of what we were seeking?

“Is this the soul mate whom I spent years pursuing?” How many of you have secretly asked yourselves this question as you looked at the woman who lay next to you with hair unkempt and all her physical flaws exposed in the dim daylight? Of the fifty percent of married couples who get a divorce I believe all of them had great aspirations for their marriages once and the dream of living “happily ever after” was still pretty intact before they walked down the aisle. Not many people speak or write about “post-honeymoon blues,” but I believe it is a real issue that we are afraid to touch.

“Post-victory blues” is something we rarely mention. After you have won a highly contested game and with a beating heart you clutched the trophy tightly with your trembling hands, the nagging question of “is this all there is to it?” probably didn’t surface in your mind, but it would surely come the morning after when you woke up from your drunken stupor and found out that the hang-over from taking in a big gulp of victory was a lot longer than any drunkenness that you have ever experienced.

All things, no matter how great they are, are vanities if we leave Jesus out of them; all things, no matter how insignificant they are, are felicities if Jesus is in them. If we do all things out of our trust in Jesus with an intention to glorify him, peace and joy will follow; if we do all things out of confidence in our own flesh with a selfish goal to glorify ourselves, our hearts will be overcome by dissension and sorrow in the end.

I learned somewhere that there are more people buried under the glamorous city of Paris than those who live above her, yet very few people even bother to look underneath and learn a valuable lesson from the dead. Life is a gift from God; how are we going to use it? Are we going to use it purely for our own enjoyment, or use it in such a way that the gift-Giver is honored and highly exalted.

Starting another career at my age is becoming increasingly difficult. Shall I be thinking about retirement as my next move? It is indeed depressing if I keep on pondering on this issue. We have a bad habit of evaluating our lives by career and accomplishments, not knowing that life should be measured by the little things we have done which don’t seem to mean a whole lot. People who do small things well are great people, but the ones who focus solely on doing big things are small people. I don’t think the ones who leave dirty dishes in the kitchen for their wives to clean and rarely pick their crying babes up at midnight to console them and put them back to sleep or to change their diapers when needed, amount to much in God’s kingdom, no matter how accomplished and worldly-wise they are.