The Joy Stone

I just remembered it this morning--the stone that sits copious miles to the east in my Vermont drawer. It is a mere pebble really, rather plainly dressed in its smooth robe of creamy white and yellow, and likely the gift of some river before it was the gift of a family friend on my tenth Christmas. In fact, if someone were to throw my stone out into the dirt road by our house on one of these rainy autumn days, and if it were to land upside down, only the grater coming by next spring might turn it over and cause one to stoop and wonder at the word "joy" lying in the mud.

Joy is unique in that way, coming in odd combinations and ungainly carriages. Yesterday it was pawprints in the sand and the flambuoyant fiery gold of unleaving trees, twelve years ago it was dashing barefoot about the yard in the first snow, and a few weeks past it was the homely box turtles and lizard in Tennessee. Turned upsidedown, none of these would be too elaborate either--except perhaps the underbelly of the turtle--and yet they are joy all the same.

I do not think that the gift of my inscripted pocket stone was accidental, although like many things at that age, I somehow missed the significance. I guess I am joy, beyond simply being captured often by it, but even right-side up, we humans aren't too much to look at either. We're awkward. We have dirty shoes. Our hearts continually connive evilities.

Paul writes: "I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always offering prayer with joy in my every prayer for you all, in view of your participation in the gospel from the first day until now. For I am confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil. 1:3-6). If we find joy in things down in our neck of the woods, and if upright and purified minds praying for us find a greater Joy in our learning that true Joy is found in a higher JOY, how much more must the greatest JOY of all experienced by our Lord as he looks down with JOY upon his children who have asked Him to right them and pick them up out of the dirt?

Do bear that around with you. It will grow joyously warm-enough-to-sprout in your pocket, even as you begin to grow and burst resplendent out of His.