Psalm 30:5b – “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”
Did you know that joy is a choice? I used to think it was a feeling – similar to how I used to view love.
Each year, the Lord gives me a word of the year. The year of 2024, the Lord gave me the word Joy. That year, I learned that I had to be intentional with finding joy.
With trials and the busyness of life, the bad can easily overshadow the good. Each night I took time to reflect on my day, to see where God was in the midst of everything. Some days it felt like there was nothing, just struggles and torment. But God taught me, on those days, He is my joy. He is my hope. The joy was in what would come. I had to choose to recognize it even though I may not have felt it.
For over three years, I have been going through the trenches. Every single night has been a battle. Bad dreams, spiritual attacks, the battle of the mind, anxious thoughts, fear, etc. I prayed for God to take it away, to fix it. I even tried to fix it on my own. I spent so much time trying to figure out how I got here, who did it, what are they doing, why are they doing it.
As I sought the Lord more, He told me to “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). He assured me that the battle was His and not for me to fight, but to focus on seeking Him.
“Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10)
This didn’t mean things stopped. Each night I was faced with a battle that stacked on top of the previous nights of torment. The noises, the things I saw in my dreams, the whispers of the enemy. It was so tiring. Every day I had to make a choice to keep showing up.
I was met with my greatest fears, night after night. Feeling unsafe, like someone was going to hurt me, insecure, skeptical of others, hearing things, seeing things, feeling things that didn’t make sense. And night after night, I went to God each morning where He met me in His word and helped me get to know Him. That gave me strength, confidence, distraction, and He drew me deeper into His love.
Every sleepless night, every cry to God, every time – I made a choice to run to God in worship, prayer, and pressing into His word. Instead of learning to fight, I learned who He was. His character. His love for His people. The purpose behind what He does. That He is in control of everything and nothing is bigger than Him. That He sees me and wants me to focus on Him, not the noise around me. Throughout this, He became my place of safety, my refuge, the one I run to in times of need.
Night after night, torment, but I learned to choose joy. To find gratitude. To acknowledge that God is still good regardless of the circumstances, because that is who He is. To remember that there is hope in what is to come, and sometimes that hope is what you have to hold on to. Night after night, He truly turned my weeping into joy.
Leave a Reply