We’d just arrived home–our Africa home–from home assignment, where we’d made the agonizing decision it was time to move back. 

I stood before my refugee students, smiling warmly, internally stricken. Shaken. I wonder if my expression seemed as brittle to them. 

Over and over in the next few months, curriculum required of course, I taught on trust and joy. Even as my insides curled from the heat of loss.

Joy in that season required the constant realigning of my vision, a constant tipping up of my chin. As John Piper writes, “The fight for joy is first and always a fight to see.” 

For months (okay, it was longer), it was as if my life’s path sidled perilously close to a cliff, the space beyond black, gnashing at me. Holding onto joy felt like slipping and scrabbling on scree.

I wondered specifically how I would know if I had joy. Because yes, a part of it whiffs of a Godward happiness. 

When I define joy, I ask myself a couple of odd questions. 

If we’re to rejoice and be joyful at all times as believers, could I use my definition to, say, my refugee students, scarred invisibly by war or rape or hunger or displacement? Could I say it to a person standing by the grave of a child? Or is my definition of joy a Christian version of positive thinking… a Jesus-Barbie handing out plastic cookies? 

Here’s what I think. Yes, joy is a happiness in God. While, yes, it does affect my feelings, it’s more defined by satisfaction of the soul than a chipper mood. 

Perhaps–deep in my gut, which I imagine to be a bit of a dark, heavy place–it is an unshakable trust that God is good. My head is lifted from my circumstances, control, grief, and fear to a broader, weightier hope. Peace. A lighter burden.

As I type, I wonder what wilderness you’re stumbling through. What grief. I ask God for joy for you. Not giddiness or positive, whitewashed thinking, but instead, a profound Presence in your darkness.