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Chapter Five

Joyful Source

“I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.”

(Romans 15:13)

The year that my husband and I decided to seek fertility treatment was the same year we decided to relocate our lives. We were living in a city across the country from our families’. We felt the need to be closer to family and closer to the places where we grew up as we thought about raising children. My husband’s company had a convenient location near our family with a job opportunity available for him. After moving across the country and finding a specialist to work with, we immediately started fertility treatments. After one year of unsuccessful fertility treatments, we moved forward to the adoption process. During these years, I remained unemployed for various reasons which left me with abundant time for projects and daydreaming of our future family.

After one year stretched into two, I decided it might be better to spend my time doing more than planning a baby nursery and daydreaming of a family. Through our church, I randomly fell into a volunteer position for a nonprofit kitchen that provided meals to the working poor and homeless. With very little industrial kitchen experience or experience with the homeless–this was out of my comfort zone.

While volunteering on a regular basis, I met a group of people whose source of joy was surely that of the Lord. Regardless of the task they had been given, whether it was mopping the floor or serving food, they did the task with complete joy. From the nonprofit leader to the kitchen managers to the servers, every one of them presented with a mysterious shining light. After a few weeks, I was given a consistent task of rolling out the pizza dough for the lunch menu. For two to three hours at a time, I would stand in the same spot and roll out 40 pizzas. It was the most meditative, joyful, fulfilling hours of my week. The people we were serving usually walked in looking defeated yet left in an entirely different light. The meals were about so much more than providing food to those in need. The meals provided nourishment of the spirit and the soul.

God is our source of hope, our source of wisdom, our source of love. The more we trust in him, the more he provides. When we surround ourselves with those who have accepted him as their nourishment, we are then filled with their light. That nourishment, that light that you receive, will then radiate joy and peace towards others.

Wait with Hope

Can you think of a person or a group of people who exude confident hope and joy in their daily actions?

Do you recognize their source of joy as their relationship with God or some other source?

Are there times when you feel drawn to them and other times when you feel the need to avoid them?

Can you think of a place or event that you can find people who radiate this source?

Can you think of daily actions that can bring you closer to people with this source?