Spreading Joy

In order to keep my brain from turning to mush, I decided to take a break from my most recent TV obsession (The Good Wife) and find something that would inspire me. I remembered someone saying that Papa Benny (or Pope Benedict XVI for those of you who only know him by his more formal name..hehe) would be gracing the world with his first tweet today, and my source turned out to be true! I'm sure his 873,000 followers were elated. I, however, needed more than 140 characters from him. Naturally I enlisted Google’s help, because no one knows more than Google, and eventually I found this gem: 

“Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. Joy, then, does not break with solidarity. When it is the right kind of joy, when it is not egotistic, when it comes from the perception of the good, then it wants to communicate itself, and it gets passed on. In this connection, it always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us. Obviously, despite all their misery, they still have the perception of the good to which they cling and in which they can find encouragement and strength.

In this sense we have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately only faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and to be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news.”

I know I find myself getting caught in this trap. *I’ll preface this by saying I’m a bit of an over-analyzer and a worrier.* Whenever I’m around friends who are going through a rough patch, I’m hesitant to tell them about any good event going on in my life for fear that it will make them feel worse about whatever is going on in theirs. I don’t want them to feel like I’m brushing off their sadness or trying to glaze over it. And I never know whether people want to hear about happy things when they’re not happy. It’s so situation-dependent or even minute-dependent. There are times when I welcome a distraction from my sadness and other times I just want to wallow a bit, so I’m sure everyone else feels the same way. But just because we’re sad doesn’t mean that happy things aren’t going on in our lives or in the lives of those around us. We should want to encounter that joy and allow it to overshadow the sadness instead of shutting it out and focusing on the bad. Easier said than done, right? I know it is for me. Even though I know that hearing about and seeing someone else’s joy always brings a smile to my face, I still hesitate to look for it when I’m in a funk. Even though I know how refreshing and relieving it is to laugh, I still find myself listening to sad music or reading a sad book when I’m down. Why is that? I would heal much more quickly if I allowed myself to seek and experience that joy. I think it comes down to trust, just like Papa Benny said. If I would just put my trust in the Lord and in His plan for me, it would be much easier to encounter that joy because I’d be more likely to look for it. We can’t find something if we’re not looking.

So that’s my goal for the rest of this week—offer up everything to God each and every day so that I can see how much different the days are when I allow and welcome His control and so that I can experience and share more joy :)