How To Desperately Pursue Joy When Your strength is Fading

Joy.  A mysterious feeling that eludes me a lot of the time.

This is my daughter, Summer, when she was 3 years old. She is basking in joy.  She was discovering a wading pool for the first time. She kept running back and screaming at me and I finally caught it on video and this is a still shot of that.

I think this describes how I feel today. This is day 2 of feeling light, free and full of joy. I can’t explain why—-there’s no reason. I know I have also forced myself to share some of my dark days on social media as well. I guess I did this because I never want to be perceived as someone who is perfect or has it all together.

But I have had two mornings now where I feel like Summer does discovering this pool. And I want to be grateful. I’m so thankful to God for these days. For joy. This gives me hope.

I know he is with me in the dark days and that he will use them but I’m glad today is the way it is. I’m thankful that a girl in my challenge group posted that she hates mornings but made herself get up at 5:20am yesterday to workout – it helped me get up today to do mine.

I’m thankful that two of my kids chose to ride their bikes beside me today as I ran with them to school:) They even thought it was fun! Jaden said he would ride as slow as I wanted – he was willing to sacrifice and be late for school. He’s such a sacrificial kid…note sarcasm.

I am well aware that the solution for depression is NOT thankfulness. People don’t understand that. It’s not about being ungrateful or not seeing the good in your life…it’s about an inexplicable sadness…if you could explain it, you could fix it. So by no means am I saying be thankful today in order to fix your depression.

I’m just saying today I have the strength to be thankful…to see things I can’t always see.