How to Find Joy When the Life You Have Is Not the Life You Hoped ForSample

A Journey To Find Joy

You and I have a set of expectations about how our lives should turn out. You may have expected marriage to be easy, expected to be able to conceive a child, or expected your hard work to turn into financial success.

But when marriage is difficult (or non-existent), infertility persists, or your business collapses, hope can feel so far away.

Like many experiences in life, longing presents all sorts of questions. But one particular problem with longing is that those questions tend to not have easy answers. And the hardest part is that we don’t discover this until we exhaust ourselves by throwing quick fixes at our problems.

Have you ever done this? It’s the moment we’ve done so many Google searches to find an answer and finally reached that last page of results—that one that exists in some dark corner of the internet—only to realize there’s no real solution there. We’ve asked all our friends, pastors, or coworkers for help, only to receive pity or shallow band-aid statements to cover the wound. Lastly, we’ve asked God for help, a lot.

But when prayer after prayer is not answered the way we want, we can become disillusioned, not knowing how to move forward or rebuild the dreams that have crumbled. This disillusionment can persist for a long time, causing our souls to become emotionally weary as we tire from the burden of carrying the weight of our despair.

Navigating our longing can be a confusing and complicated process. But having a friend to walk with you through the season can be helpful, especially when that friend has experienced longing themselves.

The more I’ve grown in my walk with the Lord, the more I’ve come to realize that He has provided us with some great “friends” in Scripture. In the Bible, there is wisdom and solace in the lives of other people of faith who have walked this earth thousands of years before you and me.

One such friend is Joshua.

In this devotion, we’ll look at Joshua’s life outlined in the pages of Scripture. The verses we read will serve as a guide to help us understand how to navigate our own season of longing because in a short period of time we will see God invite Joshua into a place of self-examination, lament, hope, remembrance, faith, and joy.

Friend, I don’t know what longing looks like for you today. I don’t know the story behind the disappointment you bear, nor do I know the specifics of your disillusionment or despair. I don’t know which life you wish you could wake up to each morning. But I do know what it’s like to wrestle with God over the story you wish you had, and I want to tell you this: the joy you seek is possible to find.