Tag: curiosity

How Joy Fuels Resilience

“Joy is the oxygen for doing hard things in the world.” -Gary Haugen

I was listening to a podcast one day as I drove and I heard these words. I reached quickly for the pause button and released the breath that had seized in my lungs.

“Joy is the oxygen for doing hard things in the world.”

Do you ever hear a phrase or idea that just makes you hit pause on your inner dialogue?

I repeated the words out loud, mulling them over, contemplating the feel of them on my lips.

“Joy is the oxygen for doing hard things in the world.”

The man who said this is Gary Haugen. He is the founder and CEO of the International Justice Mission. His work to help “the least of these” in the most dire and unjust of circumstances forces him to come face to face with sin, exploitation, and brokenness every single day. He says that no one can do that kind of work without attending to their own souls; without coming up for air.

And this air he speaks of?

It’s joy.

“Joy is the oxygen for doing hard things.”

He and his colleagues force themselves to be intentional about laughter and silliness. This is not to ignore the devastation that they see and know all too well, but instead to sustain their engagement with it. 

Oxygen for the hard – that seems to be the elusive chase I am on.

My parents gifted me the name “Joy” as my middle name, mirroring my mother’s own middle name. Twenty-five years later I would bestow the same name on my own sweet daughter, adding it to the two names she’d already been given by her biological mother.

In general, I consider myself to be a joyful person – one who carries optimism and positivity and sees the world in that glass-half-full sort of perspective. But the last few years have brought deep fear, deep grief and deep pain that have challenged that inner baseline.

Joy, at times, has felt like sand sifting between my fingers. Something I just can’t quite hold on to.

Sometimes the thought of joy has felt like betrayal. How do you hold both grief and joy in your hands simultaneously?

But this joy is the fuel that allows us to sustain and continue engaging in the beautiful, heart-breaking, messiness of the life and world we find ourselves in.

It’s what fuels our resilience – our ability to get back up, keep going, try again.

So how do we seek out joy in our lives?

  1. Presence – we live in a world that is obsessed with moving faster, further, quicker. It takes intentionality to choose to sit in the present moment and notice what is going on around us and inside of us. I am convinced that slowing down to notice the present moment and engage it propels us toward joy. Letting go of both past and present allows us to be fully alive in ways that we rarely experience. Present moment awareness invites us to see beauty, to acknowledge our own emotions and to get off the hamster wheel. Notice the sunlight filtering through the trees, the sticky hands tucked inside your own, the swell of the music, the flicker of the firelight. Notice the way your breathing slows when you close your eyes. Notice and name the emotions you are experiencing and give them space to be before rushing past them or pushing them away.

2. Gratitude – More and more studies offer evidence that practising gratitude can radically shift our hormonal levels, physical and spiritual health and resiliency. Gratitude rejects the scarcity mentality that screams we are not enough, that we don’t have enough, that we need to conserve and protect our resources, time and energy to survive. Gratitude embraces enoughness, abundance and rest. It sits smack in the middle of the hard, looks up and hunts for the gift of a breath, a sunny day, a tender moment. It’s a gateway to joy.

3. Play – as children, we intuitively knew the pathway to joy was through play. But somehow, as grown ups, we think this has changed. Joy must be found through productivity or efficiency and play is something for children or something reserved for a few scarce hours of the week. Play beckons us to lay aside the measuring sticks and qualifiers and should haves and invites us to enter into curiosity, delight and adventure. Choosing to play as an adult can feel like a bit of a revolution. Am I even allowed to play? Shouldn’t I be doing something better right now? What would it look like for you to choose to play today? When is the last time you did something that was really fun? Do you like to participate in sports? Paint? Ride horses? Swim? Dance? Life is heavy and hard and just a lot – but play makes it feel just a little lighter.

4. Curiosity – I believe that asking questions, wondering and taking a stance of humility gives us access to joy. Again, as children we didn’t presume to know it all or have it all figured out. We asked questions. We wondered. We went exploring and hypothesized and experimented. On a recent hike on the forest trail near our home, we met a man with a woven basket in hand hunting for mushrooms. I watched my son’s eyes as he learned words like posporous and fungus and broke apart a small poisonous puffball that emitted a dark, cloudy substance. Did you know there are mushrooms that turn leathery when dried and can be formed into hats? Did you know that mushrooms are neither plants nor animals but take in oxygen in a way that makes them more similiar to an animal than a plant? For the next leg of our hike my son’s eyes scanned the tree trunks, mossy fallen logs and wet undergrowth for signs of mushrooms. He lit up with curiosity. Carrying the weight of knowledge is heavy. I know it feels like everyone else has this life thing all figured out. I know you feel like everyone else in the room knows the answers. I know that living under the eye of expectations makes you feel like you need to show up with answers, strategies and expertise. But who is asking you to know all these things? What if we were never meant to carry all this knowledge? We are over-informed, over-stimulated and over-educated with a giant suitcase of anxiety to show for it. What if there is freedom and joy found in the words “I don’t know.” What if we sat back and let ourselves sit in the curiosity for a moment before we rush to google for answers. As we follow our curiosity, we will find ourselves learning new things and growing in ways we never anticipated.

5. Abide – In the book of Nehemiah we find a verse that says, “Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” In context, this verse is found in chapter 8, after the walls of Jerusalem have been reassembled and the exiled peoples have been brought back together. As the Law of Moses is read before the people, they begin to weep and mourn. They see their sin and shortcomings and they are grieving all that has gone awry in the story of God’s chosen people. But Ezra and the Levites encourage the people to calm themselves, go their way and rejoice in the holiness of this day. “Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy the of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8:10) There is a time for repentance and mourning and fasting and lent…but ultimately this is not where our hope and strength lie! Our hope, our strength, our joy is found in abiding in Christ. His joy is one that can ground us amidst the darkest of chapters.

“Joy is the oxygen for doing hard things in the world.”

What does your hard look like right now?

What feels heavy?

Where are you counting your resources or capacity and coming up short?

Have you considered how you might be able to infuse JOY into your present reality?

Not to dismiss the hard.

Not to try to white knuckle your way through a difficult season.

Not to minimize the grief or the fear or the brokenness of the world.

No, the purpose of this JOY is to find strength and endurance!

Strength to keep going; to keep investing in the hard spaces, the challenging relationships, the slow, meticulous work of tearing down the lies and seeking truth.

You need oxygen, friend.

You need a steady source of nourishment and hydration that will sustain you through every last leg of the journey.

Some might call this self care.

Some might call this inner work or the building of resilience.

Today we’re calling it oxygen and we’re tracing it’s source back to joy.

Presence, gratitude, play, curiosity and abiding.

“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy.” Psalm 16:

Reading Aloud with Your Family

Every now and then in the sea of parenting books I am constantly reading, there is one that connects with my soul and makes me say, Yes!  That’s it!

Recently I stumbled across one of these books.

The Read Aloud Family by Sarah Mackenzie inspired me, challenged me and helped me dream again as a Mom.

As a young girl I fell head over heels in love with books.  I learned to read with ease at a very young age and spent hours poring over books.  Stories enchanted me, carrying me to new places and introducing new ideas.

I used to spend hours wandering the isles of the public library, pulling out one book after another to scan the back cover or flip through the pages to get an idea of the content.  When it was time to go I would painfully sort through my huge stack and try to decide which ones were my favourites and which ones I would leave behind until next time.

As a mother, I would love to see my children discover stories the way I did.  To be delighted for hours on end, swept away to other worlds and times in a story is a beautiful way to spend a childhood.

A reader is never bored.

Five years into my mothering journey, however, I have come to realize that some of my children are not wired to dive into literature the way I am.  Learning disabilities and high energy levels can throw some major barriers on the roadway to reading, and for some of my children reading will always feel more like a decoding exercise than a fascinating way to spend a couple hours.

Imagine trying to read a book upside down while looking in a mirror with itchy mosquito bites all over you begging to be scratched.  That is approximately what it feels like for one of my children in particular to sit down with a book.

What The Read Aloud Family introduced to me was the idea that even if my children are never able to launch into the world of literacy independently, they can still enjoy stories and let their imaginations take them to these far away places through me reading aloud to them!  Not only that, but the benefits of reading are not only limited to enjoyment…though that should still be our number one goal when we read aloud!

When you read aloud to your children, these 5 things will happen:

1. With the chore of decoding words out of the way, your children will be able to settle in and enjoy the story, setting them up to experience the joy and magic of stories.

Though it is certainly true that life requires a lot of mandatory reading that is not fun, I want my children to pick up books because they want to.  Reading aloud to your children and introducing audio books to them gives them the opportunity to experience what it is like when the chore of learning to read is put behind them and they can effortlessly experience the content of the writing.  Though it is still going to take work to learn how to read, we all know the more that you read the better reader you will become!  If we can motivate our children toward reading with pleasure instead of a feeling of obligation, they are much more likely to succeed in becoming strong readers.  Nothing will make them want to pick up books more than falling in love with stories.  You can help them do this by reading interesting books to them, including books that would be too difficult for them to read on their own.

2. When you read aloud you will be exposing your children to phonetically correct language which will help them develop their own ability to read, write and speak correctly. 

Constantly taking in new vocabulary and proper sentence structure through the ear will inevitably result in the same coming out through their own mouths and writing.  It is exciting and funny to watch your children try out new vocabulary and ways of speaking.  I love seeing little ones trying to include big words they have picked up while writing their personal stories.  It’s also fun to explore vocabulary with your children as you read, giving them definitions for those interesting words you stumble across.

3. When you read aloud with your children you can help them learn how to make connections in the content.

This is a skill that is so important for children to develop as it is linked to their comprehension of what they are reading.  It is not enough just to be able to decode words; they need to be able to comprehend the ideas being portrayed behind the words.  Understanding similes, metaphors, foreshadowing and motives behind the content they are reading is imperative.  When reading aloud, taking the time to ask simple questions or explore opinions can encourage your children to be thinking while they are taking in content and analyzing it’s motives and meaning.  In a culture where our children are being bombarded with messages, I want my children to know how to use critical thinking to develop their own convictions and ideas confidently.  You can encourage three kinds of connections: text to text (connecting to another book or earlier chapter), text to self (connecting to his or her own life) and text to world (connecting to something in the broader world or culture.)           

4. When you read aloud to your children you will be building memories together. 

This is my favourite motivation to read aloud.  There are few things I would rather give to my children than to remember me being truly present with them, hearing my voice reading to them and experiencing the intimacy of a shared story.  I can still hear my mother’s voice, see myself and my four siblings sprawled around the living room and remember affectionately the tears in her eyes the first time she read Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows.  That moment in time will be lodged in my soul forever.  I can see my fourth grade teacher’s classic high heels and feel the hard, scratchy carpet beneath me when I pick up the book Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson  and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.  My husband inherited the well beloved Thornton T. Burgess collection of bedtime stories from his grandparents and we are currently reading through his well loved copy of The Adventures of Chatterer the Squirrel.  My daughters were delighted to learn this was one of their Dad’s favourite childhood stories.  Gordon Korman’s humorous stories bring back memories to me of laughter and camaraderie with my siblings and cousins as we would retell the stories and pass on the latest sequels.  Stories that are shared provide material for conversations and opportunities to explore difficult topics.  Love, honor, courage, grief…these are topics often explored, even in very young children’s literature.

5. Last of all, when you read to your children you will also be reading to yourself! 

I have been reminded this summer that there are few things I enjoy more than a good story.  I love when the kids are begging for just one more chapter at bedtime and I cave, despite the time, because I just can’t wait to see what happens next!  I love reading, and with five children in the house, there aren’t a lot of quiet moments where I can pick up my own books so if I can experience reading and spend time with my children simultaneously…that’s a win for me!  I also love having an excuse to pick up those elementary age books again.  Many of the best books I have ever read are written for ages 8-12 year olds.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White, Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maude Montgomery and Ramona Quimby Age 8 by Beverly Cleary; what a humorous, enchanting and enjoyable repertoire!  And those few books are just barely scratching the surface of a gold mine filled with hours of adventure and entertainment.  Even picture books for little kids can be interesting and fun to read as an adult.  I have loved my boys’ recent favourites; The Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle and Jill McElmurry, Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker, Big Bad Bruce by Bill Peet and Mighty Dads by Joan Holub and James Dean.

If any of this sounds exciting or intriguing to you I encourage you to pick up a copy of Sarah Mackenzie’s book, The Read Aloud Family.  This manual to reading aloud with your family will give you inspiration, practical tips, book lists for every age group and tips for choosing good books.  I promise you will not regret it!

~AF