Joy is Strength

I’m always sceptical of news reports that start something like “Recent research has found that...” or “According to a recent survey...”  because the supposed results of the so-called research quite often contradict what has been reported the previous month. According to the news this morning, the latest one is that recent research has shown that bottling up your emotions and harbouring negative thoughts will increase the possibility of cancer by up to 70 % and knock years off your life expectancy.

Now the idea that “the joy of the Lord is your strength” might be millenia old, having been first declared by Nehemiah to the people of Israel in the 5th Century BC, but it seems that it might just be the right solution for our stressed-out twenty first century lifestyle. This last week, I spent four out of the five working mornings in hospital waiting rooms for tests and treatments in relation to my recently diagnosed melanoma.

It struck me as I watched people come and go, just how debilitating cancer can be. Just the expression on peoples’ faces, the way that they carried themselves, indicated how totally the cancer knocks you for six - the surgery, the anxiety and the waiting, the chemo and the radiotherapy. It all has the combined capacity to take the wind out of your sails, and the legs out from underneath you. One minute you’re up and busy, buoyant, full of the joys of life, and the next, you’re wondering what tomorrow will bring, and will you survive to the end of the year. It was written into the faces of the patients as they passed through the clinic, bowed down, enslaved almost, by this tyrannical force that had taken over with and was threatening to kill them.

So important then, to draw on the “joy of the Lord” for strength - to know that, not only, is He all powerful and all knowing, but also He has a plan, and it’s a good plan, for your life, and that His joy - that eternal, ebullient undiminished capacity to revel in life, and to enjoy it to the full - is part of that plan too.