Joy in the Junk : How to Find Joy in the Manure Pile of Life
Once there were five-year-old twin boys, one a pessimist and the other an optimist. Wondering how two boys who seemed so alike could be so different, their parents took them to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist took the pessimist to a room piled high with new toys, expecting the boy to be thrilled, but instead he burst into tears.
Puzzled, the psychiatrist asked, “Don’t you want to play with these toys?” “Yes,” the little boy bawled, “but if I did, I’d only break them.”
Next the psychiatrist took the optimist to a room piled high with horse manure. The boy yelped with delight, clambered to the top of the pile, and joyfully dug out scoop after scoop, tossing the manure into the air with glee. “What on earth are you doing?” the psychiatrist asked.
“Well,” said the boy, beaming, “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”
Most of us are not in one camp or the other all the time, but we’d also be hard-pressed to say we’d look for that pony when surrounded by manure. Yet, even if that is not our first instinct, we can learn to look for joy when life delivers us more manure than flowers or new toys.
Joy Tips
Here are a few tips on finding joy in the manure pile of life:
1. Practice gratitude in the little things. It is a muscle that must be exercised. If the gratitude muscle is strong from regular workouts, it will be easier to engage it when a dump truck of manure comes.
2. Words have power over our thoughts, so use affirming and uplifting words daily. When asked how your day is going, don’t recite all the difficulties, express something positive. When you make a mistake, don’t berate yourself but instead make a joke. Soon those positive words will have you seeing the glass half-full instead of half-empty.
3. I find there is nothing better for my outlook on my pile of manure than seeing the pile from a different perspective. If I focus on my own pile, it looks overwhelming and stinks something awful. But if I spend time helping someone else with their pile, all of a sudden my pile doesn’t look so bad. In fact, I am happy to go home and begin shoveling because I can. I have two arms and two legs. I have the money for a dump truck. I have friends to help me with my pile. And that smell? Why, come to think of it, it reminds me of a happy memory from long ago. It doesn’t smell too bad now.
Day-to-Day Manure
The manure pile of life can be difficult for us to handle on a day-to-day basis, because if we don’t regularly shovel it out, it can continue to pile up and eventually bury us. Just like housekeeping, if I don’t tidy my home regularly, soon I find I must take a full day to do what would have only taken a hour or so on several days.
So, take inventory at the end of the day. Do you need to do some shoveling? God wants to take our manure piles—the Bible calls them cares. It tells us He longs to take our cares from us and in return he will give us rest. This is a great practice. When my mind is reeling as I’m trying to slip off to sleep, that is a sure sign I need to cast my cares on Him. After all, He is so much better at shoveling my manure than I ever will be.
Manure Avalanches
But then there are times when it’s not a daily accumulation of manure, but it’s an avalanche of manure. We lose a job, there are more bills than income, a dreaded diagnosis is learned, or a wayward child or grandchild has us on our knees. At these times we don’t want to look for the pony (and if we did, then we wouldn’t have a grasp on reality). That’s when we must remember our secret weapon: the principles of finding joy in the midst of adversity.
The Secret
The same principles that allowed us to shovel that manure daily—gratitude for the little things, using our words to speak life and hope, and focusing on others—allow us to survive the avalanche when it comes. Using those techniques allows us not merely to survive, but to survive with joy in our hearts, because the joy will not be there because the circumstance dictates it, but because we’ve learned the secret of joy. Joy is given as a gift from God, and it is given even in, and sometimes the most often in, the midst of the manure the world casts on us.
Are you more of the pessimist or the optimist, or somewhere in between?
Which one of the three tips will you put into practice this week?
Do you find it difficult to say affirming or uplifting words when the manure of life is piled high? What small change can you make today to move the needle on this difficulty?