I hope everyone is having a quiet week before the end of summer vacation, for those who do have summer vacation. I find that the days pass quickly and I do very little. Yesterday I did not even post a blog. I thought I had posted ahead and did not even look until this evening when I am posting for tomorrow. Today I am sharing some thoughts from Henri Nouwen's "From Here and Now" that I found in the July 23 issue of The Tablet.
"Joy is essential to the spiritual life. Whatever we may think of or say about God, when we are not joyful, out thoughts and words cannot bear fruit. Jesus reveals to us God's love so that his joy may become ours and our joy may become complete. Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing,- sickness, failure, emotional distress, opression, war, or even death- can take that love away. Joy is not the same as happiness. We can be unhappy about many things, bujt joy can still be there because it comes fro the knowledge of God's love for us. Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us."
I think this is worth reading over several times. Sometimes we may forget that joy is essential to the spiritual life and that we have to choose joy!
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