A small spark each week to help you live with heart and keep your fire lit!

Word: Joy

Sentence:

Joy often grows from the soil of struggle.

Passage:

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about joy. The absence of it in our lives is something I find intriguing. The further I move from my youth, the more joy seems to elude me. The mounting pressures of adulthood can suffocate it, and if our childhoods offered little or no joy at all, life becomes even heavier, each day carrying a quiet hum of exhaustion.

As I started to intentionally reflect on joy, I asked myself three questions: “What makes me happy? Why does that make me happy? When in my younger life did I first discover joy? When I sat with those questions, I realized that much of my joy has always come from connection, from learning and growing alongside others, especially when things were hard.

I struggled to read, what would later be diagnosed as dyslexia and a reading comprehension disability, and even after receiving special education support, I was always playing catch-up. To this day, I have to read things multiple times to fully absorb them, and if I’m stressed, forget it.

But that struggle also taught me something powerful about joy. Because reading came slowly, I learned early on to find joy elsewhere, in people, in teamwork, in shared effort. Group projects, team sports, anywhere I could belong to something bigger than myself. Partly because my peers had access to what I didn’t, but mostly because being in community gave me purpose. What once felt like limitation became a doorway. Where I lacked skill, I found connection. That connection became my joy.

Tracing that past helps me see more clearly how joy shows up in my life and work today. Give me a community and a purpose, and my joy shines.

If you’re searching for joy, think back to when you first learned something new. What were you doing in that moment, and how did it make you feel? The clues to our joy are often hidden in the same places where we once struggled, learned, and grew.

When we lose our joy, we lose our purpose. And when we lose our purpose, we lose hope, for ourselves and for others. Joy may not always come looking for us, but we can still go looking for it. And when we do, we often find it waiting right where it began.

Your Turn:

When did you first discover joy, and how might reconnecting with that moment help you find it again today?

Hit that comment button and share your feedback and experiences with these words.