The other day I was driving down Route 3 on Merritt Island. It was late afternoon and the weather alternated from rain to sunshine and rain again seemingly every five hundred feet or so.
As I got closer to the Pineda Causeway, the trees and brush along the side of the road cleared, giving me a clear view of the river. A heavy mist settled on top of the water, but above the mist were breaks of blue in the sky and as the clouds parted, they revealed a greater beauty.
A rainbow.
And not just any rainbow, but a full and complete rainbow, one so solid you’re tempted to stop everything and go search out its ending for that pot of gold.
It was so beautiful, I felt my foot let up on the gas, and the car began to slow. Here and there the trees began to block my view, but when I could see the rainbow, my head whipped about as I tried to freeze the image in my memory … without crashing the car.
Every time I caught a glimpse of that rainbow, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling.
I smile a lot these days. I also cry a lot too. But whether I’m smiling or crying, the emotion is the same:
Joy.
It’s a new emotion for me.
When I was a kid—a teenager—the events of my life made joy something only experienced in fairy tales, whether it be Dorothy, opening the door in black and white Kansas to reveal a Technicolor Oz, or it be Lucy, walking through the wardrobe and finding a wintry, fantastical Narnia on the other side.
The writers of those fairy tales knew something about joy.
Joy is transforming.
Joy has transformed me.
When I returned to work in August for the start of the school year, people kept asking me if I had gotten a new haircut or if I had lost weight. The answer was “no” to the haircut and only five pounds over the summer, hardly enough to account for me looking different.
But I was different, somehow, and people saw that though they couldn’t quite put their finger on the change.
The joy I have now I really struggle to put into words. It is knowledge of God’s love. It is knowledge, finally, of the person God means me to be … the real me … the true self. And so, not only do I feel like a different person, I guess I look like one too.
In her book Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison writes about the power of joy, “One joy, the Chinese believe, scatters a hundred griefs.”
Joy is not just transforming, it is also healing. God uses joy to heal and transform.
When God heals, He does not simply close old wounds with Godly stitches. He does not put in place metaphorical casts and splints. He does not perform surgery.
When God heals, He transforms. He remakes you. He washes you clean and gives you a new heart, a new spirit. He doesn’t try to make repairs.
He makes you new.
And even though there are times now when I can hardly recognize myself, the core of who I am and who I have always been … sings.
And the song I sing is the song of joy.
