I was thinking this morning as I was doing my crunches about joy and how it intersects with my life.  My marriage, which, like most marriages, has not always been easy.  Finances have always been an “issue” to say the least.  These last few months with so many changes, not just financial, but in finally learning about Jim’s issues with depression (oft suspected in my mind, but never diagnosed till now) in the midst of his losing his job and attempting to make ends meet with various endeavors have been particularly difficult.  Sometimes, I feel like a great big ball of rubber bands, constantly bunched together at the point of springing open.  It’s a weird sensation.

Through it all, of course, there has been help and support and love from those around us.  But it is very difficult to be honest about all that this struggle has entailed.  There is a fine line between sharing too much with others and not sharing enough.  Often I find myself second guessing what I may have said to someone else, “was I selfish?”  “Did I not take into account the struggles someone else might be having or make my pain seem greater than the other person’s; as if I somehow ‘count’ more?”

It’s hard to experience joy in this state.  Do I even really know what it is?  This is a pressing question as we approach our Pascha, the feast of feasts.  In church, where I should be able to lay aside all earthly cares, I find myself distracted by them instead.  Certainly this reflects my lack of faith.  Will I truly be able to release those internal rubber bands and  experience all the joy that Pascha is?  Elder Porphyrios says in Wounded by Love:

Paradise is for one to see forever the face of God.  It is an experience higher than the sight of flowers and exotic birds, of clear gurgling water and roses and of all the beauties that exist on earth, and higher than all lesser loves.

I know that the joy we feel here on earth is only a reflection of the true joy in paradise.  But I do so want to at least be able to step into that reflection, if only for an instant.  But it seems such a struggle to do so, to lay aside all the earthly cares that bind me. Am I to struggle for this joy?  

I don’t have an answer.

God bless…