When you can't find God, find joy. God will meet you there!
I felt stuck. I knew that God had something big coming my way, but I just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling, at least in a spiritual sense, of walking through a fog so thick that moving felt difficult. No matter what I tried I couldn’t shake the feeling. On occasion, I would get a glimpse of an inspiration, but not the inspiration itself. I began to understand what St. John of the Cross meant by “the dark night of the soul.”
Early one morning as I sat in my study trying to calm my mind and release the ego-driven need to figure things out, I experienced a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious): trying so hard to figure God out is the very thing that kept me from… well, figuring God out. Who knew? This BFO was, and is, a freeing experience.
As I rested in the rush of relief a thought came to me: If you can’t find God, find joy. God will meet you there. I decided right then to focus on some of the things that bring me joy: the people I love and truly love me, inspiring music, joyful memories…. Over the next few days, I kept my attention on the joyfulness in my life. In small but increasingly frequent ways God began to show me what I needed to do next. This post and Substack site are a result, BTW.
I began to share this BFO and the thought about joy with the people in my life who talked to me about their spiritual struggles. I’m a hospice chaplain, so there are a lot of people in my life who fit that category. Everyone, literally everyone, with whom I shared this with had a common response: a rush of emotion and a sudden realization of the significance. Letting go of the struggle and finding joy in the mundane experiences of life is the key to hearing God’s still small voice.
So, when you are going through difficulties and challenges, remember, God will meet you wherever you find joy.
Blessings! Brent