By Lisa S Tarno

I am setting my mind on joyful living! It’s purposeful and the secret sauce to living well. We have the control to choose our thoughts. We can direct our minds and be intentional about what we will think about and what we won’t. The backdrop of joy first needs to come into focus. Joy is a by-product of thankfulness and gratefulness. It’s an equation of sorts…thankfulness plus gratefulness equals JOY! Let’s unwrap this.

In order to be thankful, I need to slow down and take the time to look at things around me. This reflection time is essential in today’s world. Thankful is defined as, “feeling or expressing gratitude.”Everything is happening so fast, information is coming at us from many directions and at times it gets overwhelming to process. Being thankful is a mindfulness skill to master. Whether we come by it naturally or not, it still takes effort to pause and reflect and process. I have a sticky note in my medicine cabinet that reminds me to reflect on things I am thankful for while I brush my teeth at night before bed. Even in the musical, “White Christmas” there’s a song about counting your blessings instead of sheep in order to go to sleep at night. 

Add in gratefulness which is defined as, “warm and deep appreciation for kindness received”. There are plenty of non pleasant things that happen to all us everyday… gratefulness, to me, is deliberately looking for the goodness or kindness in our days. Some days we may be hard pressed to find it but the discipline of digging for it etches our character. We create good habits of intentionally looking for things to be grateful for. Gratefulness seems to go deeper and thankfulness seems to be for the more obvious. They are very similar though. 

Why is this necessary for JOY? It comes with what we focus on. The more we focus on what we are thankful and grateful for, something shifts in our brains. There are studies that show MRI imagery from a negative mind and a positive mind. The negative (ungrateful, unthankful, joyless  i.e. depressed) mind is altered in the amygdala and grey matter of the brain as well as shrinkage of the brain! There are many sources to verify that by doing your own search online. 

The practice of being thankful and grateful takes some effort to recall, remember and reflect and at times reframe. It’s like a brain exercise just as much as doing puzzles and games that help create new neural pathways. In the Bible, a Psalmist writes, “I will offer to You the sacrifice of thanksgiving…” (Ps 116:17) and several other writers often had a point of the REDIRECT. In essence they were saying all these bad things are happening to me or others YET WILL I REMEMBER! “Remember the things I have done in the past. For I alone am God! I am God, and there is none like me.” Isaiah 46:9

Thankfulness and gratefulness are the REDIRECT in our lives which FORCE us to remember that the sum total of our lives isn’t all bad…there is good too. We are either at the beginning of a new challenge, in the middle or coming out of the challenge….this is life! It is essential to discipline our minds to be able to redirect or we too can fall victim to self pity, negative thoughts and depression. The antidote is in our YET moments (more so for believers in Christ because God takes care of us and answers our every prayer with either yes, no or wait.)

In my house I have a gratitude box. Inside are years worth of answered prayers for my family. I write down on a sticky note when I see answered prayers and put them in the box over the course of a year. Usually, when my kids were younger, I would open the box on Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s Day and go through the sticky notes of God’s goodness and provision for us. It ranged from a passing grade on a hard test to improved health to bigger things like a career move. Why did I do this? I did it initially to help build my children’s faith in our God who is faithful and answers our prayers. I did it to track to God’s movement in our lives over a year’s time. But I also did it for myself because all throughout scripture it talks about how we need to remember God and His goodness to us. We tend to forget…and when we forget we can get sucked into wrong mindsets.

What is the wonderful result of this disciplined mind? JOY!  It says in Nehemiah 8:10, “Don’t be dejected and sad, for the joy of the LORD is your strength!” Never have more truer words been said. As believers, our joy is in the Lord…not things, not people…it is found in the Lord alone. Psalm 62:1,5 says, “Truly my soul finds rest in God…Yes, my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him.” 

I am going to end with one of my favorite scriptures. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him. May his hope overflow in you by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:13. This is a life verse for me! I live by this and pray this over my life almost every day. I have studied this and wondered why the apostle Paul wrote about two fruit of the spirit qualities (joy and peace) and not the others. See Galatians 5:22-23 for the other fruit of the Spirit qualities. I have surmised that he was emphasizing warfare fruit! Joy and peace! If we have the joy of the Lord and it is our strength and we have the peace of God which transcends all understanding…we are untouchable by the enemy of our souls! We are strong and untouchable. Think about that…that is what I want to be!