By Jarrod Ramirez, Room In The Inn Staff
“Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
James 1:2-4
I vividly remember the conversation in which this passage – a passage that I have no memory of not knowing – took new life. I was sitting with a dear friend, Baer, and we were discussing the trials that were presently consuming our minds. He was navigating a very difficult season of life and transition, and I was battling the fear that had come from my father receiving a terminal diagnosis. In the midst of our conversation, I mentioned this passage in an attempt to ease our pain, which led Baer to share with me what this verse meant to him.
He described his brain as a filing cabinet with major compartments of different emotional responses and all circumstances and events as sheets of paper needing to be filed. Baer shared with me that when he thinks of considering trials as joy, he simply views it as taking all the sheets that should be filed under a plethora of other responses and placing them within the joy file. And suddenly, I found a shift taking place in my mind. Joy was no longer trying to find the good in a bad situation so that I could overlook the hardship, nor was it simply putting on a happy face and wishing for the absence of trials. Joy became an active choice to live into hope; a hope for new creation to be brought up from a dry and weary ground.
This kind of joy takes strength, a strength we cannot muster up for ourselves. This kind of joy comes from the outpouring of the very heart of a God who did not shy away from trials, but knowing the joy that awaited Him, entered into our own suffering so that through Him we may experience the life of God.
I see this strength daily within our Room In The Inn community; a strength that is willing to stand defiantly in the face of the darkness that draws ever near and still choose joy. I see the strength to choose joy in the smiling faces of those in our community who seem to have known nothing but trials. I see it in dayroom dance parties and in the art of our community. I hear the strength to choose joy in the laughter that fills our day center on gloomy days, the chatter of conversation that overflows from shared meals that fill empty stomachs, and in the kind words of those in our community who rarely have kindness extended to them. I feel the strength to choose joy in the tenderness of a hug from someone who cannot remember that last time they received a tender expression of touch.
I cannot imagine the strength it takes for those in our community to consider their trials as joy, and yet it seems more often than not that the members of our Room In The Inn community are some of the most joy filled people that I know. And I am beginning to realize that when I think of joy, it is their faces that I see.
