The Joy

I sat in the airport, leaned back in my chair, and closed my eyes for just a moment. I had just flown home from a week of work in Nashville. When the plane landed and I checked my email, I discovered an urgent deliverable waiting for me. Instead of heading straight home, I opened my laptop at the terminal and got to work. It felt wiser to finish it there than to bring it home with me, especially after being gone all week. My kids would want my attention the minute I walked through the door.

But before I started, I needed a minute to breathe.

It had been a hard week, long nights at the office, early mornings, and the steady hum of pressure that never quite turned off. Fatigue had settled in deeper than I realized.

I finished the assignment, closed my laptop, and finally drove home. I spent a few precious hours with my kids, then fell into bed, completely spent.  Before turning out the light, I stared at the ceiling and prayed a simple, honest prayer:

“God, I don’t feel like I enjoy my life anymore. Please teach me how.”

It surprised me how true that felt. Even beyond the current workload, I wasn’t sure I had ever really learned how to enjoy life. Too often, I've lived bracing for the next responsibility, the next season, the next demand. I drifted to sleep wondering why joy seemed to come so easily to others while my days often felt heavy.

The next morning, a text message arrived from my Bible study group. They were preparing a surprise project for an upcoming retreat.

Can you send a photo from your phone that brings you joy?

Timely. I scrolled through my pictures but didn’t find anything that felt right. It wasn’t the lack of good photos, it was the lack of joy I felt in that moment. Maybe I just needed time off, I thought. A break. A reset. Maybe even a spa day.

Instead, that morning at church, the message centered on one phrase: choose life.

Deuteronomy 30:19–20 says:
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life… love the Lord your God, listen to His voice, and hold fast to Him. For the Lord is your life.”

Choosing life, truly living it, came down to three things in this verse in Deuteronomy.

Love the Lord

I love God and I also know love is more than belief; it is action. But as I listened to the sermon about loving the Lord, I found myself quietly wondering, How do I actually do that when I’m already so exhausted? When my mind feels overloaded and my energy is gone, love can feel like one more thing to accomplish.  I need relief, not one more thing to do.

But loving God is not another heavy task. It is a turning of the mind.

Loving Him with my thoughts means intentionally redirecting my attention, even for a few minutes, away from the noise and pressure and back toward His presence. It looks like disengaging from the swirl of responsibilities long enough to practice gratitude. To notice His gifts. To remember His faithfulness. To remind myself that His approval matters more than anyone else’s, including my own harsh self-assessment.

Even five minutes in His Word can change the tone of an entire day.

The most important part of loving God is not emotional intensity, it is mental focus. What we dwell on shapes how we feel. When my thoughts remain fixed on my problems, the weight grows heavier. But when my focus shifts toward His presence, something inside me steadies. Peace begins to rise. Joy becomes possible again. Sometimes even energy returns.

The circumstances may not change, but the center of gravity does.

Instead of looking around at everything that feels overwhelming, I am learning to look up. Our problems in this life are real, and Scripture is honest about that, we are told we will face many trials. But we are also told that God has overcome the world. Remembering that truth reframes the pressure.

Love for God, and receiving His love, doesn’t remove our burdens, but it keeps us from feeling like we are drowning beneath them. It changes our perspective before it changes our situation.

Loving God is deeply life-giving. It strengthens us. It steadies us. It heals worn places in the heart. Joy grows where attention rests on Him.  This kind of love is practiced in the mind. It requires intention. We choose what to think about. We choose what to return to. We choose what to remember.

And in that choosing, life begins to feel lighter again.

Obey His Voice

There is no lasting peace without obedience, but I’ve learned that obedience often looks different than we expect. For a long time, I assumed obeying God meant doing something dramatic; changing careers, moving across the world, or stepping into some large, visible calling. While God certainly does lead people into big acts of faith, most of His work in my life has come through much smaller invitations. Big obedience, it turns out, is usually built on small obedience.  The quiet, daily choices that rarely draw attention but steadily shape the heart.

In my own experience, the most meaningful change has come through simple promptings: take a walk, pause and pray at lunchtime, step away and rest, spend a few minutes in Scripture. These nudges often arrive right in the middle of a busy day, when they feel least convenient. God’s invitations rarely fit neatly into my schedule. They interrupt what I planned and redirect my attention, yet they consistently lead toward greater peace and clarity. What seems small in the moment often produces the greatest long-term change.

One of the smallest, and surprisingly hardest, areas of obedience for me has been consistently spending time in His Word each day. It sounds simple enough, but in the middle of meetings, phone calls, conversations, and working lunches, I convince myself I’m too busy to stop. And yet, it is precisely in the middle of the busy when I need Him most. You wouldn’t think protecting five or ten minutes a day would be difficult, but for a long time, it was a real struggle for me.

I’ve noticed the irony: I can easily name my stress and complain about my workload, yet when God points me toward the very practice that strengthens my faith and steadies my heart, I sometimes resist it. Still, He is patient. He teaches gently and persistently. Over time, as I chose to respond in small ways, those minutes in the Word began to feel less like an obligation and more like a refuge. Now I find myself looking forward to the moments when I can close the door, open my Bible, and reset my thoughts. It took time to build that habit into my daily routine, but it has paid dividends in peace, perspective, and resilience.

Obedience doesn’t always look like changing the world. Sometimes it is simply responding to the small thing God places on your heart today. But when those small acts are practiced faithfully, one after another, they add up to real transformation. What begins quietly often ends up becoming life-changing.

Hold fast to Him

Holding fast to God means staying anchored to Him when life feels uncertain and when distractions compete for our attention. Our world offers endless noise, screens, messages, opinions, demands, and constant motion. Much of it pulls at our focus and promises stability, yet none of it provides the steady security that Christ does. His hand is the one I want to cling to, especially in seasons when my own grip feels weak.

I was in a large airport not long ago, riding one of those crowded trams that shuttle passengers between terminals. Most people were standing, since the limited seats were reserved for those with mobility needs. Typically you can hold onto a hanging strap or a vertical post, but that day the tram was packed tight, and I found myself without anything solid to grasp, only a flat stretch of wall beside me. When the tram lurched forward, it accelerated faster than I expected, and I nearly lost my balance. Instinctively, I reached out, but there was nothing secure to hold. Seeing this, a few people shifted and made room so I could grab onto a nearby post.

The difference was immediate. The post did not sway with the crowd. It did not tip when weight leaned against it. It did not adjust itself to accommodate movement. It was fixed, stable, and dependable; exactly what I needed in that moment of motion and imbalance.

Holding fast to God works the same way. Life will surge forward at uncomfortable speeds whether we feel ready or not. Situations change. People shift. Crowds gather and scatter. Emotions rise and fall. But Christ remains steady. He does not move with the pressure. He is not destabilized by chaos. He is not shaken by sudden turns.

We hold fast to Him not because life is calm, but because it isn’t. He is the fixed point in the moving train. The steady support in the jolt. The unchanging anchor in a shifting world. And when we hold fast to what does not move, something inside of us begins to steady as well.

I began to see that what I needed wasn’t a day at the spa, it was a morning anchored in God’s presence. Joy doesn’t grow from escaping our lives; it grows from re-centering them. It grows in gratitude. It grows when our eyes lift from the rush around us and return to the One who never shifts.

So I picked up my phone again and searched for a photo that brought me joy. This time I saw it.  A sunset spilling gold across the sky, quiet and magnificent.

I sent it to my Bible study leader with a simple note:

God’s creativity brings me such joy.

The photo had been there all along.  I simply needed a different perspective.