Even though there is very little between the appearance of happiness and true joy they can be worlds apart, and it all comes down to the heart.
When a person strives for peace, seeking it for all their worth, but they cannot find it, often it is the case that they’re trying too hard. When a person is burning out, they crave peace more than ever, but they’re trapped within an unrelenting lifestyle. They may attempt to make all sorts of adjustments that seem reasonable and logical when a complete attitude change is required because transformation and step change are required.
Ironically, everything we ought to know that needs to be held lightly is usually held too tight.
Joy is a gift that can only be enjoyed without pressure. It’s the same for peace. Peace comes with letting go, with accepting what we cannot change. Hope is not hard if our expectations are realistic.
One of my favorite quotes is from a devoted Christian missionary who died in his 20s. Jim Eliot once said, “A person is no fool who gives up what they cannot keep to gain what they cannot lose.”
There is incredible wisdom in this pithy saying. The key to be learned is that only as we let go and insist we don’t have control over what we would love to control do we stand to be at peace. That’s right.
Give up on striving for peace, and suddenly peace is in sight.
It’s the same for joy and hope, and indeed as I’ve often said, peace, joy, and hope coalesce.
Joy comes when we focus on the simplest things to the exclusion of the overwhelm we could otherwise get lost in. The overwhelm comes from chasing joy in a myriad of different things that would, of themselves, never deliver any joy. For hope, we subconsciously chase higher expectations of things than are possibly delivered. Our idealism betrays us.
Many things in this life promise joy, hope, and peace but end up just being hoaxes.
Centrally what this is all about is the heart. What on earth am I talking about?
Women will often understand this quicker and better than men. Men tend to be pragmatic and fixers of things. Men might typically ‘organize’ themselves some peace but may be very quickly undone when they find themselves in situations where they cannot control outcomes.
This is a concept that breeds hope, joy, and peace without any effort. When there is nothing left to lose, there are few expectations, hope, joy, and peace suddenly come sharply into view.
What is the key facilitator to this attitude that procures peace, hope, and joy? It’s just that. It’s a heart attitude, and just about the only way to this place of being is, paradoxically, grief and suffering, i.e., when we experience unrelenting loss.
Grief lays siege to the idea that we are in control over our lives.
Grief teaches us that our default thinking is wrong; we are not in as much control as we think we are.
Grief withholds external peace, hope, and joy.
Grief insists that we find peace, hope, and joy from within.
The greatest thing about adversity is that it teaches us to look deeper into the source of real peace, hope, and joy. Adversity causes us to search passionately for that which cannot be found any other way.
Grief is the antecedent of action. It forces us to find what we’re looking for in places we don’t know exist. Such pain undoes us, but in the unraveling, we find ourselves. Grief causes us to go deeper in our understanding, deeper for answers, and deeper for peace, hope, and joy than ever.
Being frequently broken by an experience that is void of peace, hope, and joy, we wonder why our lives have become so hard. And yet it’s not until we have been to such a place that we find the truest peace, hope, and joy we have ever known.
We only get what we want in life when we refuse to insist on having what we want. And, dare I say it, this is the Gospel life. The direct way to this life is God.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Tribework
Featured Image by Sebastian Staines on Unsplash
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