Today's Heartlift with Janell
Sometimes the story we tell ourselves is not really true. Sometimes the story others tell about us is not really true. On "Today's Heartlift with Janell," Author, Trauma-informed, board-certified marriage and family specialist, and Professional Heartlifter, Janell Rardon, opens conversations about how emotional health and mental fitness effects absolutely every area of our lives. When we possess and practice healthy, strong, resilient emotional health practices, life is so much better. Read Janell's newest book, "Stronger Every Day: 9 Tools for an Emotionally Healthy You."
Today's Heartlift with Janell
301. Cultivating More Joy
Embark on a heartfelt journey with us as we welcome Alastair Stern, author of "Longing for Joy: An Invitation into the Goodness and Beauty of Life." In today's episode, we navigate the challenging landscape of depression, guided by a personal narrative that sheds light on the simmering presence of mental health struggles and the path to healing. The discussion highlights the crucial role of medication, therapy, and the development of new habits like gratitude and movement in overcoming these challenges. Alastair inspires us to see joy as a slow, intentional process of growth, akin to spiritual sanctification.
Order his newest book: LONGING FOR JOY
Visit Alastair's Substack, "Ordinary Matters"
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Today's episode is brought to you in full by Heart Lift International, a 501c3 dedicated to making home and family the safest, most secure place on earth. Learn how you can donate and support the podcast at heartliftcentralcom. Now settle in for today's remarkable conversation with Janelle. Now settle in for today's remarkable conversation with Janelle, wherever you find yourself today.
Speaker 2:may these words help you become stronger in every way. A reading from Longing for Joy An Invitation into the Goodness and Beauty of Life, by Alistair Sturm. When joy comes out to play, it is when something good is at hand. She stirs our hearts to celebrate goodness in its many, many forms. And so often, as is her way, joy shows up when we're with others or thinking of them, Because she is deeply relational by nature. She takes us by the hands and dances in the space between us. Joy rises and falls like a crescendo. As her symphony ends, we sigh in appreciation. It is good.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited to bring to you Heartlifters Alistair Stern. He is a creative director turned pastor. He serves as the associate pastor at Coastline Church in Victoria, british Columbia. He has previously partnered with Redeemer City to City and founded St Peter's Fireside, a creative liturgical church in Vancouver. He is the author of our book today, longing for Joy an invitation into the goodness and beauty of life, and his first book, rhythms for Life Spiritual Practices for who God Made you to Be. I highly recommend, highly recommend.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to today's Heart Lift with Janelle a little jingle jangle edition. Yes, it is the Christmas season and I am embracing it with such an incredible amount of expectation this season. If you haven't already, I would love to invite you to join me and a whole little community of heartlifters who are going to be doing some advent glimmering. Glimmering is quite the opposite of triggering. So when we're glimmering, we are looking, we're hunting, we're seeking, we're searching for cues that ignite within us a robust feeling of joy and beauty and peace and ease. And all the good feelings right, I love me some good feelings. So in order to be a part, to participate with us, I am doing this through Heart Lift Central over on Substack, and I am offering this to my paid subscribers, and to honor that, I have sliced the fee and given it quite a healthy discount. You can become a monthly subscriber or an annual subscriber with this slashing discount why not? We've had Black Friday, cyber Monday, and I just thought I'd join in on the fun. Don't get to do that very often, and so when you become a paid subscriber over on Heart Lift Central, you will receive these four bonus, beautiful bonus packages of an audio meditation, a beautiful PDF guide and some video teachings as well. And then it'll all culminate on December 23rd, from 7 to 8 pm Eastern Standard Time. Well, we'll gather on a Zoom gathering, have a little cup of cheer and share our community glimmers, and we will just end it with a festivity of glimmering. I am already feeling joy in my heart just from saying glimmering so many times.
Speaker 2:So what do you do you go to? At Heart Lift Central. That'll bring you right to my sub stack, heart Lift Central, and there's where you have your very own online community of heart lifters committed to what? Our healthy sense of self, healthy behavior patterns and healthy communication skills. I had so much fun creating this series for you, so I encourage you to not only receive this gift. Yes, there is a minimal fee, but that fee is a way to show your support the podcasting wing of my nonprofit, and that is today's Heart Lift with Janelle. We are reaching all over the world, by the way, and your support your financial support, of course, your prayerful support as well, but your financial support enables me to do this work, to fund all of the different things that it takes to run this podcast. So please visit Heart Lift Central and become a paid subscriber it's discounted for you right now and enjoy this advent glimmering season with me.
Speaker 2:Okay, without further ado, I bring to you today an incredible show with Alistair Stern, the author of Longing for Joy. Oh, my goodness, you're really in for a treat. My whole new tenant for this community is joy building, and Alistair's new book is a manual for doing so. So, heartlifters, let's give Alistair a very warm, heartlifting welcome. Heartlifters, here he is. I told you I was bringing to you Alistair Stern. Alistair, welcome to the show. I am so happy and grateful to have you come here and instruct us on how to find joy, how to joy hunt in our life is what I call it joy hunt and joy build, welcome.
Speaker 3:Yeah, janelle, thank you for having me, and it was just such a joy to chat with you beforehand. I'm really excited for this conversation.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just so happy to have you here. I love that. You know I am privileged to get a media kit, which is fun, but then I usually do my own things because I just get so deep into the book.
Speaker 2:But I love that it says taking joy back. From joy mania, you know, from authors who just say step one, step two. I'm a prescriptive author so I don't really like to call it self-help, but prescriptive nonfiction there does tend to be a leaning towards steps. Your book is different and it's making me just deeply grateful. Making me just deeply grateful. You know one of my mottos the last few months, maybe six months actually has been when the student is ready, the teacher will appear and then, when the student's really ready, the teachers will disappear, which really has a lot of profound biblical meaning to me. And so I put that, I prayed that and God has just been so faithful and you are one of those answers to my prayers because I am craving teaching on joy, craving it. So you say very early on it's not about choosing joy, so tell the little story around that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was in the office and saw a coworker had a magnet that said choose joy, and so when she went on her lunch break I snuck in with a Sharpie and crossed it out and wrote cultivate joy. It's just brilliant. Yeah, and I like to be generous, Like I think when people say choose joy they mean well, right.
Speaker 3:I don't think anybody who says choose joy is advocating something harmful. But I think it can sometimes become a pressure that builds and it can become a bit of a mantra of toxic positivity that doesn't want to tend to other important emotions. And so choosing joy is also a bit reductionistic because, um, I wish our, our emotional life was that simple, like if I could just determine how I feel. That would be great, and and I don't want to deny that we have some influence over our emotions.
Speaker 2:Oh, we do, for sure yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we can. We can definitely shape our emotional experience, but we, we are not fully in control. And so if, if you say choose joy and you mean, hey, I want to have a mindset that is intentionally trying to keep an eye out for joy and live a life that's more joyful, hey, I'm with you and I think that's what people mean. But I think a better word is cultivate.
Speaker 2:I love the word cultivate. It is just my gardening hands. Just get it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I use this analogy of gardening in my book of you can't choose carrots out of your garden unless you plant the seeds and tend to the garden. So choosing carrots is an outcome of the cultivation. In the same way, choosing joy would be an outcome of cultivating your life to be lived on the precipice of joy, always on the threshold of joy, as an ever present possibility. So I I choose cultivate, also because I think joy speaks in the middle voice. Um, the theologian Charles Matthews talks about joy speaking in the middle voice. It's. It's both active joy, something that happens to us, um, sorry, passive joy is something that happens to us, but also active. It takes some effort on our part and it's, it's not just one or the other.
Speaker 3:Sometimes we're totally surprised by joy, caught off guard, and it happens to us, and then sometimes we're actually doing something like gratitude, rejoicing, and joy comes alongside and says great. So I think cultivation gets to the heart of that middle voice where there's an active and passive kind of participation in the life of joy, and our work isn't so much of laying a hold of joy directly, but cultivating our lives to be more ready to dance with joy when joy is nearby or when joy arrives.
Speaker 2:And so you personify her so beautifully I love to personify emotions, like all I could think about was inside out two. Well, inside out one, of course, joy is the main character, but in inside out two, she has quite the transformation, and so if you haven't seen it, uh, I would highly recommend watching it in parallel with this conversation with Alistair, because joy just has quite a transformation. I don't know what else to say. Watch it with great care.
Speaker 3:I want to summarize the transformation of similar to my own journey honestly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, tell us, I went through a season of depression and joylessness that lasted for several years and coming out of that season, there's many factors, but one was recognizing that I, oh they're in a better place. It's a platitude, and I'm sure the person who says that often means well, but they often say it because they don't want to share in the grief or they don't know what to say. They just don't know what to say anything. I was just numb and I would be like well, the Bible says to rejoice always, so just work on rejoicing more. And I was just ignoring conveniently the passages that say you know, weep with those who weep, mourn with those who mourn, lament.
Speaker 3:You know all these other emotions that we need to process, and so, similar to joy in Pixar's movie, where she was spiritually bypassing you know the protagonist's memories so that they're only joyful without any other emotions I had to kind of embody the wisdom of Brene Brown that says you can't selectively numb emotions. You numb one, you numb them all, and it was in learning to make room for grief and sorrow that joy surprised me, and so it wasn't that I got my whole life figured out or fixed everything, it was just that I started feeling the full spectrum of emotions again. So if you're lacking joy sometimes, you actually need to pay attention to your joylessness.
Speaker 2:Oh, and you do, and you write about it so well. Can I read just a couple paragraphs?
Speaker 3:Sure yeah, thank you, you write depression.
Speaker 2:Can I read just a couple of paragraphs? Sure, yeah, Thank you. You write depression A few months after I started medication. Now I'm starting midstream, so you're just going to have to get his book and read it. A few months after I started medication, I was alone and I wasn't doing anything but sitting on my couch. But I felt different. I've been here, Alistair. I've been here, Alistair. I've been here. I couldn't name the feeling at first. Then an epiphany I was happy as I sat, so still as not to scare happiness away, Joy said don't mind if I do, and cozied between us. She felt like the presence of a friend after a long absence.
Speaker 2:You pick up where you left off and you write about medication playing a part On my therapist side. I am so curious if depression walked alongside of you your whole life, or maybe sadness, or did it just suddenly appear? And if you would maybe help us have a peek behind the curtain to help someone understand you don't have to. But was it just one moment in life? All of a sudden you got really depressed and it didn't go away. The black cloud just hovered over. Or was it, uh, circumstantial? What brought on that? That depression with a capital d?
Speaker 3:yeah, that's a great question. Um, I I went through some childhood trauma that, um, I think a lot of my life can kind of be like a textbook example of what happens when any child experiences any trauma is that you know you're going to be inclined in a certain direction, and so I think for me, depression was largely a simmering experience for me of it was just kind of this like baseline. I've always been very existential and I would err on the angsty side of existentialism toward nihilism, you know.
Speaker 2:Okay, tell us a little bit more about that, a little bit more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, just like I always had, this struggle of like life just seems meaningless, everything I do doesn't seem to have a purpose, and that was just a nagging thing that my parents, as as as well as they, loved me. Just that's not their experience of life, and so they they didn't quite understand how deeply I think that impacted me, of trying to figure those things out and and not having, I guess right.
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, thinker, thinker and and, uh, I guess right, A thinker left. We have so many high functioning men and women.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm laughing but it's not funny because it's just it's it's it's hard Cause we we think of depression and we think of it impacting like you can't get out of bed, and certainly that is a severe form of depression. I don't want to gloss that, but for me that was never the problem. Um, the problem was that I wasn't feeling anything at a certain point. And so just flash forward into my thirties and I'm, I'm church planting and we're, we're starting a family simultaneously, so we've got a newborn, and and then, you know, there was some conflict in the church that I was walking through, and and then I had my first anxiety attack and I've I've never experienced something like that before and I haven't since.
Speaker 3:And that's how I ended up in the doctor's office and, you know, ran through the phq-9, which is kind of like a psychological assessment tool, and I scored yeah, I scored very high in severe depression and she's ir and she, she just kind of was like um, when I take this test I score a two, maybe a three. On a bad day, you scored 17. Um.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a great moment for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, she's like I don't know how you get through a day Like I can't imagine it, and so it was just very shocking, right Of sober. I didn't see it that way and it was in the book. I describe it as like almost like receiving the gift of tongues, like it was like a new language.
Speaker 2:Yes, I love how you describe it. Yes, it was a new language for you. I love that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so I recognize like for me, medication was a path I went and for some people there's a lot of fear around medication because it involves the mind and we have this kind of like disembodied view of the mind, like the mind's not a part of the body. But you know, I see antidepressants the same way I would see taking medication for a heart issue or diabetes or whatever. It's just, it doesn't change who you are or whatever. Like it's just, it doesn't change who you, it doesn't change who you are. And for my case, it actually gave me the reprieve I needed to start working on some stuff.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you for saying that.
Speaker 3:I'm no longer on medicine for myself, like after three years. My doctor was like hey, like you seem like you're doing really well. I always like to see how a client does, you know? And when I weaned off, yeah, I was fine, um, and I know that's not the case for some people, but um, so it's not. It's not a bad thing if you have to continue on that In my story. I was able to wean off but it gave me the reprieve to recognize like okay, I'm. But it gave me the reprieve to recognize like okay, I need to figure this out. And I just preached on this on Sunday of just like okay. When I paid attention to my joylessness, it was like this list right. It was like okay, so I've got unprocessed trauma that I've got to work through with a counselor yeah, a trauma-informed yeah. Yeah, the depression. I needed to develop some new habits like gratitude and running. Running was like my cure-all.
Speaker 2:Honestly, yeah, you had to get it out of your body. Movement, movement, yeah.
Speaker 3:You know my sense of like shame, because I kind of had grown in this toxic positive or a toxic shame of like what's wrong with me yeah, positive. Or a toxic shame of like what's wrong with me, yeah, and I had to work through that and even like a sense of like god's absence. I had to work through with a spiritual director and and so, like it's like this holistic thing that I was approaching, not all at once. I I use the analogy of like it's. It's like learning to brush my daughter's hair, like as a father. You know, I just figured you hack at it and that just causes pain, right, it was like no, I have to work from the tips upward and tend to the knots as you find them, and what I discovered was that Joy likes brushing the knotted hair of joylessness, and so intending to the knots.
Speaker 2:Tending to the knots.
Speaker 3:Joy met me there, so it wasn't that, oh, I had to get all that stuff fixed, even though I think I've grown quite a bit and healed quite a bit. It was actually just paying attention to my joylessness. Then joy was like, yeah, I'm here too, there's room for me in this experience. But if you want to deny your joylessness, you're going to deny joy as well.
Speaker 2:And if you numb it correct, like you referenced so many things that we talk a lot about here on today's Heart, lift Brene Brown for sure. She is the one who taught me if you can't hold sorrow, you can't experience joy. You know they go together. And you and I talked about pastor tim keller before we hit record, and one of the things he said that I will never forget is we direct our emotions. Our emotions don't direct us, they don't drive us, and I never forgot that. And so that's emotional regulation right? Yes, we have the power, the capacity. God breathed it into us. You experienced not only depression, but this joylessness. You write it so well. You're in your doctoral program and you've got thousands of books. I'm using a hyperbole.
Speaker 3:Bags and stacks of books. Yeah, I bet it did.
Speaker 2:I felt it too, because I have been in that place and you're just like this is a bunch of mess. Joy, where's the joy? You can read millions of books on joy, but you can't read a book and get joy. So where was the joylessness? At that point, what was the epiphany of like okay, I need to write a book. You have one book on identity, primarily that we'll come back to at another time but this one, where was it? Was it in this discovery period of working on your doctorate?
Speaker 3:I think it. I think it was early on, but even before the doctorate of um. Um, I started getting really interested in joy, as once I was diagnosed with depression and to just touch on that again for a moment, Like for me, I think it was a combination of physiological and circumstantial issues and once I addressed some of the circumstantial things, I found my physiological experience of depression to be something quite manageable. Um, that's my experience. So I would say I have depressive moments and I still have tendencies.
Speaker 3:But I wouldn't describe myself as someone who is depressed anymore. But I recognize again that's because it's not entirely physiological for me. And so as I started to kind of walk in that path of recovery, I got really interested in joy, like why don't I have joy? And then I would experience it like how do I hold on to it? Why is it so alluring and yet so elusive? So I was preaching through Philippians during my depressive season and I recognized, oh man, I only touched on joy once. So this is Paul's most joyful letter and I only preached on joy once in 14 sermons because I just didn't know what to do with it.
Speaker 3:And so I started intentionally studying joy in the scriptures, preaching about it, reading books about it, growing in it, and out of that I was like I want to write about this and I actually wanted to write about joy before my first book. But my first book was this kind of happy accident where it was discipleship material that we had produced for our church. That kind of caught wind and became a book. So joy had been kind of stirring in my heart for a long time. And then I did a doctorate, full while knowing, like my dissertation won't be the book. My dissertation is going to be read by, you know, five people. And after the doctorates, when did I defend Um 2021, I think, oh, wow, that's very recent.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So joy was kind of like all right, when am I going to write the book? And it was just needed a bit more time to percolate, you know. So yeah, it was a desire to. On the one hand, I wanted to set up like an Ebenezer, like a makeshift model collection of stones, and just honor my story and what God's done in it and kind of codify some of the lessons.
Speaker 2:Yes, I love that.
Speaker 3:But there was also a deeper desire of like. I want to help people encounter the joy of salvation. So, whether that's like King David, if someone's praying, restore to me the joy of my salvation, or they've never encountered the joy of salvation, I really tried to write a book that I could feel confident to give to someone who's not yet a Christian and say, hey, I think not only will this teach you a lot about joy, but it'll also introduce you to the gospel.
Speaker 2:Here is the question that I had. The book is in three parts, just to go. It's longing for joy is in three parts, just to go. It's longing for joy, which bravo, with that verb, because isn't that what we all long for? Is this deep sense of joy and contentment right? The story of joy and then the possibility of joy.
Speaker 2:You write that joy is not a forced smile. I have to make sure this gets on this in this conversation. Joy is not a forced smile or suppression of negative emotions. It is not feigning a happy life or pretending all is well. Because I said to you prior to the recording that I believe my generation of women raised in the evangelical community, it was Jesus in joy, jesus, others, you, there was no, you, just you were last place. All well-meaning, as we're saying here. These are all they can. I mean. My whole premise of my second book was is it mean or well-meaning? You know so I've really studied deeply if something's well-meaning or is it just plain mean. And I think many, many, most of the time it's well-meaning. You write and this was look, I have it all like highlighted and Joy requires fostering emotional health. That just might be on my website as my next phase of what I'm going to do. What? Where did that sentence come from? Why did you put that sentence in there?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it was precisely that, like to counterbalance the excessive emphasis on positive emotions in some Christian circles. Now, I'm going to be in agreement that our baseline through eternity is going to be somewhere between experiencing joy, dancing between love and peace, right like that that's, that's the eternal trajectory, and we certainly experience that now. That's why I call joy and emotion, or eternity seeking emotion, because, whereas we want grief and sadness and sorrow to end, we joy, compassion and whatnot to last forever. But in the meantime, then, when we live in the already not yet of the kingdom, when we live in a world where there's still tragedy and suffering, we can't fragment our emotional life. And if we're going to follow the Lord, who's actually called the man of sorrows, not the man of joy, although I think- we could call him the man of joy and I make my case for that in the book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not either, or is it? Yeah, I did a whole dance choreography around that. A man of sorrows.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you even look at the Psalms and the range of emotions expressed that the Bible is really calling us to emotional health.
Speaker 3:Yes, oh my gosh, health doesn't mean to me like, oh, you feel every emotion the right way. It just means that you, there's room for every emotion and that even if the emotion is painful or more difficult to feel or a little uglier, you don't just ignore that because it's harder. And and even if the emotions are positive, you don't, you don't hold onto them so tightly that you choke the life out of them. You know, you allow the emotions to to be what they are and to communicate what they need to communicate. And and then you, you use them ideally as tethers to the heart of Christ right Of. How does this emotion draw me closer to Christ? What's the invitation here?
Speaker 2:you're just killing me. Oh, this wisdom that's coming forth from you, alistair, it's no wonder you had such existential crises in your life. You do understand. Understand that, right, you do understand that there is a lovely note.
Speaker 3:She listened to one of my podcasts I was interviewed on and she's like you, sounded very smart. But I want to remind you. I know who you are so I appreciate it. But my mom keeps me humble and it's in the most loving, loving way possible.
Speaker 2:I love to talk to your mom. That's fantastic. Well, I'm going to have to rewind that when I am editing this, because I feel like you just defined emotional health in such a tangible, beautiful way. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if I could use an analogy, right Of please, um, my, my wife's a therapist and has been, you know, specializing in intuitive eating, and so then I passively learn from her as she's internalizing it, and I think we can have this notion, misguided notion that health equals a skinny body, for example. Oh my and where a larger body is unhealthy. And there's this bias in medicine. Even right that a patient will be prescribed lose weight before you can get the surgery, but none of the actual data supports that.
Speaker 2:None of the testing coming back, the cardiac right, so you can have a very different shaped body, whether it's small or large, and be healthy.
Speaker 3:So health is not conform your body to look a certain way. Health is living in the body you have in a healthy way, Correct, and so in the same way with our emotions. It's not that we conform our emotions to look a certain way, whether it's culture, saying you know, if you grew up in a kind of stoic household, and saying you know, we don't express emotions, or conforming our emotions to always be positive and if that's kind of like the environment, but saying no, like there's a breadth of our emotions that that we're meant to experience and some of us experience them more intensely than others, Some of us have a wider range than others. But emotions are a God-given gift to our humanity and it's actually we take away our dignity when we take away the breadth of emotions. Like God didn't give us grief so that we're just in pain all the time. He gave us grief because in a world of suffering, if you couldn't grieve, what a sick world that would be.
Speaker 2:And how sick our bodies would be, and how sick many of our bodies are, because we know the body keeps the score and so much like yourself which is a great amount of the work that I've done is in trauma-informed therapy, and so if you repress those trauma memories, anything that's just too big for your body to hold, you're going to get depressed, you're going to get diseased, dis-eased, right. So I love to say that emotional health is just living in a mindfulness of dis-ease, you know, because I think the word ease is highly undervalued, because even Jesus said my yoke is easy, my burden is light. You also say a more joyful. I could camp on that for hours, but we will not. A more joyful life is not quickly developed, so there are just so many misconstrued ideas about joy, which is why I am overjoyed that you are here to help us really understand the story of joy. That's the whole section in the book, because it is slow.
Speaker 2:I think there's another article that I have put out I didn't write it called Joy Building, and it changed my life and I think that's what you're saying here. So you define it as an emotion. We know it's an emotion that arrives as our lives are apprehended by goodness or beauty. Why isn't it a quick process? Why isn't it? I just wake up. I set an intention. I choose joy today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think. I think part of the reason it's not quick is it's it's part of our sanctification. So, in the same way, like I think it was Dallas Willard who said, like there's no miracle of character healing in the Bible, like where it's like the person is just a perfect person, we heal bodies and you see moments of repentance. I mean, maybe the closest is Zacchaeus, right, like his character was healed, but he's got to walk that out, he's got to live that out.
Speaker 2:Got to walk it out. We don't get all the walking out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, who can understand the mind of God? But his heart for us is to go through the refining fires of love in such a way that the pain of being conformed to the image of Christ is tolerable enough on this earthly life. Yeah, you know so. I think that's partly why it's slow.
Speaker 3:I think, yeah, maybe like a theology of positive emotions. To me is like I think we also can't handle the breadth of God's emotion toward us. So I think of, like Ephesians three, where Paul prays for the church, that we might first be strengthened by the Spirit so that Christ can dwell in us Right, that the Spirit would fill all God's people, so that we can have the strength to be loved by the love that's beyond height and depth and breadth, loved by the love that's beyond height and depth and breadth. So to even be loved by God requires God intervening in our inner life, giving us strength to handle the breadth of his love. But wouldn't that be true of his joy as well? And so if we want to grow in joy, then there's an interior strengthening that has to happen, a fortitude, a perseverance.
Speaker 3:I also like I mentioned. If you're in the throes of joylessness like those are not usually quick fixes.
Speaker 3:So, if someone's thinking I'm going to read your book and be joyful from here on probably not. I'm hoping that it sets you in the right direction. If you're like, hey, I'll give you three years, great, you'll be more joyful in three years, yes, but you're not going to be more joyful in four weeks. But I did write the book in the hope that you'll feel joy throughout, because I'm not going to name any books, but I've read far too many books about joy that were very dour and didn't even make me crack a smile. So I've tried to write with some levity and some fun.
Speaker 2:You have. I've smiled a million times already.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and yet you know, if you want to consistently be more joyful, it's going to take continually walking in the direction of Jesus and letting Him sanctify you as he sees fit, bringing more joy into your life as he sees fit.
Speaker 2:As he sees fit. Alistair, oh, you're just really challenging me here to just get off of the path because you're going so deep, especially with having to be strengthened in our spirit in order to receive it. Can you give me a little more on that? Because I get it, I get it, really get it, but I'm not sure. Like I didn't get it a year ago.
Speaker 2:right, it has taken some deep sorrows and trials. So if we can kind of help give someone a little guide, that yeah, I think James Resegue he's I'm probably butchering his last name.
Speaker 3:I'm sorry, james, but New Testament scholar and he had a little turn of phrase I read 18 years ago I think, and I still remember it and it's just a terrible term but it works Spiritual constipation oh, yes, you're spiritually constipated. The solution to that is not eating more food, more fiber. That's going to make you very uncomfortable. And so, in the same way, like if you want more emotion like you you're not actually like if you're a really restricted person, or if you're not comfortable with emotions, like I'm still pretty uncomfortable with certain emotions- I mean, look at your face.
Speaker 2:You image that very well. You're like, if you're, if you're uncomfortable, yeah, yeah, and so it's.
Speaker 3:I've established that very well. You're like, if you're uncomfortable, yeah, yeah, and so it's going to be hard to feel the breadth of God's joy because you're not comfortable with feeling. And so I think part of why it's a slow process is we're being shaped and formed into the image of Christ, we're being prepared to share in the life of the Trinity, and we are already participating in in that divine nature and so divine, or should I say, essence.
Speaker 2:I'll let the theologians sort that out. I know yeah. But that's a process, and so yeah, because where do we cultivate joy If we go down to, I mean, the one scripture that to me was given, for us to understand where we're really going to get that joy?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think for me, my kind of core passage is John 15, when Jesus is teaching about remaining and abiding in him, making our home in him, being connected to him like a branch to the vine, doing that through faith, but also faith working itself out in love. I've told you these things so that you might love one another as I've loved you. Well, how has he loved us? Well, abide in me as I in you, because as the fathers loved me, I've loved you. Abide in my love.
Speaker 1:So there's this mystery of faith and love is how we abide.
Speaker 3:John 15, 11,. I've told you these things, that my joy may be in you and your joy may be full or complete, and so this idea is like there's a joy that we experience that's common or natural, whatever you want to call it, and these are good joys. They're not flippant, it's not bad to have joy in the birth of a grandchild, or joy for a sunset, or joy over sourdough toast with butter, like whatever it may be you know, but Jesus saying but my joy will be in you.
Speaker 3:And so this is the joy of the spirit, it's the spirit dwelling in us, sharing the heart of God with us, and I think that's something that is deeply mysterious, something that is experiential, something that tops off and fills up our joy and yet leaves us longing for more joy. And I think, for me, part of why I think the process is slow is because I think the longing doesn't go away. I think what I've come to see is our longing for joy is a kind of blessedness. You know, jesus says blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. The blessedness is not in the satisfaction, it's in the hunger.
Speaker 3:And so, god, has placed eternity in our hearts and he's made us long for him and we often feel the longing for joy more than we feel joy, and that working out of that process.
Speaker 1:The gap between it is slow because the Lord's preparing us for a glory that we can't even comprehend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean, wouldn't it be that, in his presence, uh is fullness of joy?
Speaker 1:Is it?
Speaker 2:fair to say, that's the mystery to me, Because for me and I know that I am not rare the work of being in the presence of God, setting aside busyness or ambition or strife or ministry or fill in the blank, just eats away at the source of where real joy is going to come from.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and your presence is the fullness of joy. I think that's another great passage to go to, because it's just reminding us that the face of God smiles with joy. Oh my goodness, gracious, gracious, it just really does and I think you know going to attachment theorists who look at joy as an early emotion of attachment, where you know, as an infant, you have the face of a parent beaming upon you with joy and that's how you develop a healthy attachment. That's that.
Speaker 3:It's very telling, then, that god's you know speak these words, priest the Lord bless you and keep you. Make his face shine upon you. Thank you for saying that, yeah, the face is shining with joy upon us and it's to attach us to him in a healthy way, so that we can share in his joy.
Speaker 2:Because it's the mirror neurons. Right, we can go into neuroscience we know that. We're learned here in this community into neuroscience. We know that we we're we're we're learned here in this community. I think we've been studying that and attachment and all those jazzy terms, but it's mirror neurons. When I hold my baby June or my baby Isaac or whoever you know, it's like I. I. That's why I have to be, I want to be there as close to their birth as possible.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:So I can just gaze. It's a beam, gleam, that's what they call it. You know, it's what we're all looking for. And if I don't avail myself to the invisible face of God that I can't literally see but I can sit in quiet, eventually I'm going to feel his presence, but I can't just. I can't just be busy, busy, busy, busy.
Speaker 3:I can't. Yeah, there's a, there's a, as NT Wright puts it, like we slow down to catch up with God.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's beautiful.
Speaker 3:I think that's really important when it comes to our emotional life with God. For me at least, I I can be slow to know what I'm feeling, and so it it takes time for me to be still and um, bring those feelings before the Lord and help him. Like him, help me understand what they, what they even are. Yeah, and so it's a slow work, it's just it's's a slow work, and I think that's just what it is to be walking with jesus and and being formed and changed which is joy gardeners.
Speaker 2:I like that degree by degree right yeah, and so you, the two things I did not want to leave, uh, this conversation without, is you you talk? Oh, let me just read it. The central thesis of my book you write posits such an academic that the presence of God embodies boundless joy and that his companionship assures us of the inherent possibility of experiencing profound joy in our lives. Throughout the book you, alistair, try to humanize joy and spiritualize joy. So what does that mean To humanize joy and spiritualize? I thought that was really something I want to know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the greater work was to humanize it. So I think sometimes we can speak about the joy of spirit in contrast to natural joys, and I get that tendency. Obviously, the joy of God is not the same as the joy of sourdough. That's just silly.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I think he might say I don't know how God thinks about all that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm not saying he doesn't delight in sourdough.
Speaker 2:He might delight in it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But by humanizing joy. What I want to say is we can't really speak about joy unless we're talking about a human emotion.
Speaker 2:Right, okay.
Speaker 3:We need to understand this as an emotion, not as a state, not as a conviction.
Speaker 2:Love, peace, joy, a fruit of the Spirit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the Spirit of God speaks in the human emotion of joy. No-transcript. You see every little joy as a gift coming from his hand, and so that's spiritualizing them. So I'm humanizing it so that we can spiritualize it.
Speaker 2:And how do you do that? So give me a day. Give me a day Because I can probably guarantee that you embody joy.
Speaker 3:You embody it now, yeah, I have my bad days, but I have my good days and for me gratitude is the practice that builds on ramps to joy. That's Willie Jennings' little phrase there, and I find that to be true. Where I try to express my thankfulness to people, I try to overthink people, I try to um, I try to course correct back to gratitude, um what does that look like?
Speaker 2:Just give me a real humanizing. What? How do you?
Speaker 3:yeah, um you correct that? Yeah, you know. Like my daughters, this morning I woke up to them bickering over who had to put the dishes away and I've been trying to teach them about teamwork. Oh boy, you know, and in the politest way possible, which was not very polite, I said, you know, to my eldest daughter to come see me, right?
Speaker 2:Come sit on the couch. No, that's what we said.
Speaker 3:And they got, you know, a consequence for their behavior. So I started the day off kind of grumpy. How old are they? 11 and nine.
Speaker 2:Bless you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so you know, and I'm driving them to school and and I can tell like my eldest daughter's heart's a little wounded oh my dad. Um, you know, I just reached back and held her hand for a bit.
Speaker 1:You know like little moments and I haven't necessary.
Speaker 3:I apologized to them like, hey, I was maybe too harsh there, I didn't feel that in this instance, but you know, so it's, it's my wife. If we have a tough moment, like being quick to say sorry, being quick to take ownership, being quick to recognize that if we don't live in congruence, that's going to rob us of joy, and so living a life of ongoing repentance to me is, why don't I work from the baseline assumption that I probably am the one who's wrong? Now, I know that could go too far, and so for joy. That helps me readily be like, okay, like I'm grumpy right now, but clouds are really cool, don't you think?
Speaker 1:Oh, and that's the sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:I do, yeah, I do it all the time too. Yes.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm stuck in traffic. I'm like, how wild is it that I know how to drive a car? What a cool invention. So I try to take a childlike awe to the ordinary and say, like all these things that just become automated and just a part of life, I'm like I don't know, it's pretty cool that like right now you and I are in different parts of the world and these wires and cables and computers and here we are talking, and that we have a language that we can even understand one another.
Speaker 2:It's beautiful, so cool. No Morse code, I know.
Speaker 3:Many years of discipline, of gratitude I kind of. I'm more readily disposed to be grateful.
Speaker 2:I like that you bring the word discipline in. I do, yeah, that's a real critical aspect that is like.
Speaker 3:For me, the aha moment is in 1 Thessalonians 5. Paul says Rejoice always, pray without ceasing and give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God for your life, and that God's will is for us to rejoice, pray and give thanks, and I know those qualifiers can be intense. I think what Paul's saying is like hey, when you stop, start again. If you give up, try again. Keep at it. Just keep at it is basically the goal.
Speaker 1:Don't stop.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but it's God's will, so we can fuss. What's God's will for my life? What should I do with my life? But God's will is like hey, rejoice pray, give thanks and. I found giving thanks keeps me close to the heart of God. That's good, that's really good, and so, even on my bad days, I'm always just trying to say thank you, and we will have bad days.
Speaker 2:We will. I want everyone here to know we will have bad days, I'm melancholic.
Speaker 2:I may not be clinically depressed, but I definitely suffer with depression as well. But I think what you're trying to help us understand and grasp is to make this a practice, a spiritual practice in our lives. And you say cultivate a receptivity to joy, which is what I love. I love cultivate, be aware, like you said. I mean last week my husband had a surgery and it got complicated the next day and we had to go back to the hospital and I was just not pleased. I was not happy.
Speaker 2:It was not what I had planned for the day and after being a caregiver of my mother for almost a decade, I'm wheeling him down and I'm triggering, of course, like oh no, let this not be the next 10 years of my life, you know, and I can't punish him, you know, it's not his fault, but I knew what I had to do. I had to course correct, like you said earlier, and I'm like I got to get to the chapel. I got to find me that hospital chapel, because I know me, and so I went and found it. It was very small, but the Scott, the head like a Michelangelo sky at the top of it, and so I just sat down and I got quiet. It wasn't long and I just said what am I missing? Cause I'm missing something. My attitude stinks. Help me out. Is that what you're saying? Am I allowing a cultivation?
Speaker 3:That's basically it, cause even in that moment you might not feel better, but you're saying, hey, I'm going to put my hands in the dirt, yeah, right, so so right now, all I see is the mud, but I'm going to get it in the mud and put some seeds in there, and and sometimes those seeds bloom quickly and sometimes they bloom down the road. But it's just recognizing that there is and this is going back to the choose joy, like we're choosing a perspective in which it's a mindset.
Speaker 2:I do think we have to get our mind right. I mean, paul tells us that he's very clear on that. So it involves all the things we've already said discipline, cultivation, choosing and making choices as part of thought, work, and all of these things. I do love how you have used really early on, how this reductionist attitude that we've had about this word, this emotion, this fruit of the spirit, joy. I can't begin to thank you enough for staying power in your life, for you getting off that couch and for seeking help in for your mind, your soul, your body, and that's not easy, it's really not easy for a man, and so I hope that God expands your territory in many, many beautiful, healthy ways so that you can continue to guide us all onto the path of joy.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, janelle, and this has just been such an enjoyable conversation, so thank you for hosting it and for such great questions and encouragement. It's just been the best, thank you, heartlifter.
Speaker 2:What spoke to your heart? Heartlifter, what spoke to your heart? Alistair gave us so many beautiful thoughts about joy. This went long, so I don't want to take any more of your time, but I do invite you to hop over to at heartlift central over on substack. Just put at Heart Lift Central in your Google search and my Substack will come up. And be sure to become a paid monthly subscriber or a paid annual subscriber and if you're feeling extremely generous, you can become a founding member, and that would just be awesome.
Speaker 2:It's taken me a while to complete the transition and go totally over to my sub stack to give it full focus, but we're going to be doing an advent glimmering. That's just the beginning of our time together there, no-transcript, and be sure to become a paid monthly subscriber or a paid annual subscriber, and if you're feeling extremely generous, you can become a founding member, and that would just be awesome. It's taken me a while to complete the transition and go totally over to my sub stack to give it full focus, but we're going to be doing an advent glimmering. That's just the beginning of our time together there. Heartlifter, I hope that you're already feeling more joy. I will see you over on Heart Lift Central for some Advent Glimmering.
