Title: Joy in Practicing Joy
Scripture: Philippians 4:4-9
Speaker: Ben Beasley, BenB@ChristCommunityKC.org

"Joy is not the same as happiness. We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there because it comes from the knowledge of God’s love for us. . . . Joy does not simply happen to us…[joy is] based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us."
- Henri Nouwen

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things"

“joy...can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes. Even nailed to a tree” - Fredrick Beuchner, The Hungering Dark