His Joy

Strong in the Places You Cannot See

Joy is not the same as happiness. Happiness is a fair-weather visitor — it comes when the sun is out, when the news is good, when the body feels well and the people we love are near. But joy is different. Joy is a resident. It stays when the weather turns. It does not depend on circumstances; it depends on God. And it is one of the quietest, most profound lessons that a long life tends to teach.

I came across this story in my reading, and it has stayed with me ever since. It was written by a chaplain who served in a senior care facility, and it tells of a woman I will call Shirley.

Shirley was in her late eighties. She had outlived her husband of fifty-two years, one of her children, and most of her closest friends. Her world had grown smaller in the way that worlds sometimes do with age — the trips she once took, the kitchen she once commanded, the garden she once tended were all part of another chapter now. Some might have looked at her life and called it a diminished one. They would have been wrong.

The chaplain had stopped in to check on her one afternoon — not because there was a crisis, but simply because she was there and so was he. Shirley was sitting in her chair by the window, a thin blanket across her lap, watching something outside with an expression he could only describe as quiet delight. He pulled up a chair beside her, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

Then she pointed to the windowsill. A small brown sparrow had landed there, tilting its head with the particular self-importance that sparrows seem to carry.

She said it the way you say something you have believed for a long time and never had to shout. There was no performance in it, no effort to appear grateful or spiritual. It was simply true, the way breathing is true.

The sparrow stayed for a moment longer, then lifted off into the grey afternoon sky. Shirley watched it go, and then she turned to him with a smile that had decades of living behind it.

The chaplain sat with her a while longer, and he left that room quieter than he had entered it — reminded of something he had known in his head but not yet fully settled into his heart: that joy is not loud. It does not announce itself. It does not require a perfect set of circumstances or a life free from loss. It grows in the places where God is near, and it is recognizable by this — it is steady when everything else is not.

Shirley had every human reason to be diminished by grief, and yet she was not. She had found something more durable than happiness. She had found the joy of the Lord, and it had become her strength — not in the dramatic, triumphant sense, but in the quiet, enduring sense. The strength to notice a sparrow. The strength to believe it was sent. The strength to smile at a grey afternoon and call it enough.

His Nearness is your Joy. The joy of the Lord is not fragile, and it is not reserved for the young or the healthy or the unburdened. It is available to every heart that is willing to receive it — in the middle of loss, in the middle of limitation, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon by a third-floor window. It rises in sorrow. It shines in darkness. It holds steady in weakness. And it reminds us, again and again, that God is near, His goodness remains, and His promises have not changed.

Today, look for the small joys. Not the grand ones — those are easy. Look for the ones that ask something of you: a shaft of morning light through a curtain, an old hymn drifting back from memory, the sound of a grandchild’s laughter down the hall, the warmth of a cup held between both hands. These are not accidents. They are God’s signatures — small, deliberate reminders that joy is still being sent your way, one sparrow at a time.

• The next time a small, beautiful thing catches your attention — a bird, a flower, a sudden memory — don’t let it pass unspoken. Tell someone. Say it out loud: “God sent me something beautiful today.” You may not know it, but that simple sentence plants a seed of faith in the person who hears it.
• For the Next Generation: Joy is not something you manufacture through positive thinking or the right circumstances. It is something you receive — in the ordinary, in the quiet, in the unexpected. Ask the older people in your life: “What still brings you joy?” Their answers will teach you where to look.