Enduring Joy ~ Part One

Good Morning or Good Afternoon or Good Evening, 

this post should take approximately five minutes to read from start to finish.  

How do you endure JOY? How does an immediate relative endure JOY?

This post focuses on BYU Devotional in January 2020, and it is called "Enduring Joy" by President of Brigham Young University - Kevin J. Worthen. This post is part one. I would like to share with you some highlights while I was reading the Devotional.

President Worthen has mentioned the following; " ... President Nelson summed up Lehi’s life in terms that may sound a bit like your life at times: “Clearly, Lehi knew opposition, anxiety, heartache, pain, disappointment, and sorrow.” President Nelson also noted that, in these trying circumstances, “Lehi taught a principle for spiritual survival” by declaring “boldly and without reservation a principle as revealed by the Lord: ‘Men are, that they

might have joy.’"

There it is. Joy is the key to our spiritual survival in the trying times in which we live, as well as in the trying times that lie ahead of us. When we experience “opposition, anxiety, heartache, pain, disappointment, and sorrow” things all of us are likely to face in this coming year - how are we to survive? By tapping into the power of joy.

Experiencing “a Fulness of Joy”

I believe we often underestimate the importance of the concept of joy. Without much thought, we sometimes casually wish others a joyous holiday season or invite them to spread joy. But I am not sure we fully appreciate how central joy is to God’s plan for us. 

... So my request for this coming year is that we focus more on joy; that we seek to understand it better; that we come to view it not just as a mental or emotional concept or feeling of comfort but as a principle of power - power to survive and thrive spiritually and otherwise; and that we come to experience what President Nelson has called “enduring joy.”

"The greater our sorrow, the greater our capacity to
feel joy." - Mormon Messages, "The Refiner's Fire."

So we begin by asking, “What is joy?” ... Part of the difficulty is that language is a little imprecise and ultimately inadequate to capture the concept fully. ... However, this much seems clear: joy is not merely a temporary emotion but rather a more permanent and constant condition. 

As stated in the Guide to the Scriptures, joy is “a condition of great happiness coming from righteous living.” It is not some momentary sensation of rejoicing but a condition a state of being. 

King Benjamin described it this way: Consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness.

President Dallin H. Oaks explained it this way: Joy is the ultimate sensation of well-being. It comes from being complete and in harmony with our Creator and his eternal laws. The opposite of joy is misery. Misery is more than unhappiness, sorrow, or suffering. Misery is the ultimate state of disharmony with God and his laws. 

Joy and misery are eternal emotions whose ultimate extent we are not likely to experience in mortality. In this life we have some mortal simulations, which we call happiness or pleasure and unhappiness or pain.

Notice three common elements in King Benjamin’s and Elder Oaks’s descriptions:

1. In its fulness, joy is a condition or state of being; it is a constant.

2. It comes from living in harmony with God’s laws, from keeping His commandments.

3. We may not experience it fully in this life. Indeed, because of the limits of our mortal bodies and finite minds, we likely cannot even fully describe or understand this condition.

... In fact, the scriptures indicate that we can completely experience “a fulness of joy” only after resurrection, when our perfected bodies and spirits are “inseparably connected.” Thus joy is in one sense a description of our ultimate destiny. 

Joy is at the center of God’s plan for us. ... Note that the scripture indicates we shouted for joy and not with joy. It may well be that we were not just generally rejoicing at the announcement of the plan but rather were celebrating the concept of joy itself, shouting for joy, overwhelmed at the beauty and depth of the concept of joy and our realization that we, too, might enter into that state of being that our Heavenly Parents enjoyed. 

As Joseph Smith put it, joy or “happiness is the object and design of our existence.” Joy is the very purpose for which we, and everything else in the cosmos, were created. Thus it should be no surprise that it was the “good tidings of great joy” that the angel pronounced to the shepherds at Jesus’s birth.

However, just because we may not completely experience a fulness of joy in this life, it does not mean that we are without joy in the world. Adam and Eve both recognized that their choices in the Garden of Eden made it possible that “in this life [we] shall have joy,” even “the joy of our redemption.”

Indeed, one of the purposes of this life is to develop our capacity for joy and the extent to which we do that will impact the degree to which we will experience joy both in this life and even more in the world to come. As Elder Jack H. Goaslind once observed, “Our joy in God’s kingdom will be a natural extension of the happiness we cultivate in this life.”

Thus Moroni taught that our level of joy does not automatically change with death. When the Judgment comes, he wrote, “he that is happy shall be happy still; and he that is unhappy shall be unhappy still.”

Stay Tuned until next time.