Joy When You Need It Most

If you’ve been a follower of Christ for any length of time, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that God has repeatedly shown up in my circumstances just in time. Any other time, things just wouldn’t have worked out the way they needed to. When we’re going through tough times, we naturally want God to take them away as soon as possible, but the Bible counsels us to see God’s hand at work even through our toughest, darkest days.

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,” is how the ESV puts it. Well that just is not the way most of us react to tragedy and trouble. We don’t like to hurt, we don’t want to suffer loss, we don’t like hard times and we sure don’t usually see them as anything to be joyful about. Yet, hard as it may be to see sometimes, God has a meticulous plan for your life, a unique purpose He’s preparing you for, and He knows exactly when and where to move on your behalf.

Writer and leadership expert, John Maxwell, describes a puzzle game on a baseball scoreboard, where the crowd try to identify a baseball player as one small piece of the picture is revealed at a time. Maxwell says, “I’m here to tell you that we usually get one piece of the puzzle. In God’s sovereignty and God’s timing, many of the things that happen to you and many of the things that happen to me make us just shake our heads and say, ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand this in my life.’”

One piece of the puzzle is all we may see right now, but in God’s timing, He’ll bring us to where He wants us to be, even if you and I never understand why He chose this particular path. But even on the toughest days of the journey, God wants us to know that His joy is still ours for the asking.

And what is joy worth if you can’t live it and experience it when you really need it? If God could not pour His joy into our souls when we’re hurting the most, He wouldn’t be God. It may make no sense to a logical, human mind, but we really do find God in these impossible times, and when we find Him, the joy He brings is, by definition, supernatural, and it simply can’t be stolen from us by mere circumstance. While we wait on God’s timing, joy is still our portion, right now, today, just when we need it most.