“Describe one habit that brings you joy.” That’s the hosting website’s writing prompt for today, and I wanted to pass it along to you. What is one for you? What brings you joy? What brought you joy today?

[I opened my computer to write about something else entirely. (Maybe it’s not so different, we’ll see.) Yesterday, as an aside, to illustrate the “requirements” of falling in love with & following Jesus, and the relationship between salvation & sanctification, I asked my oldest son what he’d do if I bought him a Lego set. He said, “Thank you, and build it.” Our response to His gifts are just like that, we are grateful, say “Thank You,” and we live full lives of love, joy and peace. Those are the “requirements.” The Angel wasn’t in the service, and when I told her that our son absolutely preached, it was more and more simple and profound. And I wanted to talk about it again, here. But now we have a new question to consider…]

We are often confronted with some variation of this question: Where do we find joy? It reminds me of the feeling I have when I read the story where Jesus comes upon a blind man who is calling out to Him. He stops, asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” Now, in this story, the man asks for his sight, so Jesus gives it to him.

I don’t think we’d do the same, necessarily. Faced with Jesus, I think we’d be afraid to ask for anything, hedge our prayers, feel some kind of way asking for something so personal, and instead ask for a new cane or sunglasses to better deal with our blindness. Or, worse yet, if Jesus asked us what we want, what He can do for us, and we couldn’t answer Him because we didn’t know. I get to ask this question to quite a few people, in vulnerable places, and it is crushing when they can’t answer. They usually answer after a long pause through watery eyes.

What brought you joy today? Anything? Or everything? (Maybe that’s a lot to ask. Work on a Monday morning might not be the most joyous experience.) What if we don’t know? What if there hasn’t been any joy today? What if there hasn’t for days and days? Weeks? Years?? Then what?

[Now, as I suspected, these 2 thoughts aren’t unrelated at all.]

Are we spending so much time obsessing about what we have to do, about the “requirements,” that we’ve forgotten what we get to do? And what if they’re the same thing, with the only difference being our perspective? We often don’t know what we need, and we often become so blind to the shine on His gifts that we lose the joy of the simple, beautiful response: gratitude and building.

Maybe that guy’s response to Jesus is ours, too, because usually, the only difference between joy and emptiness is our ability to see. Maybe He can give us our sight, so then we can finally see what (and Who) has been there all along.