{image via/edited by me}

I was kind of in a funk this past week. I had to go back to work after a summer off and I was just not excited about it. I let myself be pessimistic and whined quite a bit.

My anxiety kept growing and I could feel my bad attitude interfering with my enthusiasm for my job, so finally I decided that I desperately needed an attitude change… I prayed a lot and asked God to fill me with joy.

That’s when I came to a realization: joy is a choice.

Have you ever really considered that?

After this realization sunk in, I went straight to my Bible and looked in the index for all references that included the word joy. There are 45, and that isn’t including joyful or other variations. Just for kicks I checked out references including the word happy. There are only 8. Think about that for a moment…

Happy is temporal. It’s superficial. It’s an emotion.

Joy is spiritual. It contains depth and faith. It is a state of being. It is a conscious choice that requires action.

Because joy is spiritual, it’s much harder to feel. We can be happy based on our environments, but that’s not the way joy works. Just as we must re-dedicate ourselves daily to the Lord, we have to re-commit to be joyful daily – no matter what circumstances we are in.

Romans 15:13 tells us that God will fill us with joy and peace as long as we trust Him. If we trust that God knows what He’s doing with us, how could we not be joyful? We have the hope of eternity with Him. We have forgiveness through Christ. Those two things should be enough to fill us with joy always.

James 1:2 says that we should even consider trials a joy because God uses them to refine us.