Becoming “fit” for joy

Four weeks ago, I was one of four people standing in front of Biola’s Heritage Cafe, laughing in the low sun of late morning.

Before taking a brief walk, Jessica and I had stopped to enjoy some time with Stewart and Erin, two good friends who had met to mull over C.S. Lewis’ essay, Education in Wartime, before leading a freshman seminar discussion. We had just a moment ago seen my good friend Andrew and his wife Annelise, and had given her our top recommendations for light fiction that would serve as a helpful study break. Another friend, Sam, had been at our table reading over the same Lewis essay.

I can’t remember what got us laughing, but there is a special combination of time of day, meaningfulness of location, and kind of company that creates a space where it is easier to laughing than not to.

—

If you’ve read C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, you know that it introduces a number of characters who, for some reason or another, refuse to get past the hangups that prevent them from inhabiting Heaven. Heaven is a Real place, and we, as we stand today, invited though we are, aren’t yet fit to enjoy it.

The question, posed by the “solid people” is whether each person is willing to go through the pain of becoming fit for joy.

—

Last year was very difficult for me, and I all but lost both my hope and my joy. Since moving back to California, hope and joy have been slowly, but steadily, returning to me. I am more myself.

In the meantime, that means that even in a late morning in that low sun that en-goldens my friends’ forms and frames their laughter, I didn’t yet have the capacity, or the spiritual strength for full joy. My mouth muscles grew tired, and my natural smile became a forced one as I had to work harder to keep it up.

And that’s okay.

By God’s grace, my spiritual strength, my capacity for the level of joy appropriate to the place I was in is being slowly expanded.

Unfit for a low-sun morning in front of the Heritage Cafe, how much less fit am I for Heaven? But if God has sent his Spirit to produce in me the strength “that Christ would dwell in [my] heart through faith,” strength enough for intimacy with God in glory, certainly he will fit me for low-sun mornings, and more.

—

I think that is “the good” toward which God says he is working together all things. Our God, who so often seems distant, is carving us out into greater containers of joy, expanding the sonority of our spiritual diaphragms for a richer, fuller, holier laughter.

He could take everything away and still justly be called ‘Good.’ What a strange salvation.