Joyful Mysteries

Years ago I new a priest named Father Conrad (CFR) who always was filled with joy. I asked him one time how how come problems never seemed to bother him. "Everyone's got problems," he said. "I used to get stressed out all the time, but now I've learned to just say a prayer and trust God with them. They're his problems then so there is no no need for me to worry about them."

I've been thinking a lot about joy lately. What exactly is it and how do we obtain it? As my wife and I prayed the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary together the other day it struck me that each of the five mysteries relates difficult circumstances in which the people involved undoubtedly experienced hardships. These include problems like dealing with a pregnancy outside of marriage to loosing Jesus when he was 12 years old in the big city of Jerusalem. And yet these are called Joyful Mysteries. Sure, in the end everything works out but I know that if I was in these situations they wouldn't be causing me to leap for joy. So how did these people find joy? The common denominator is that just like Father Conrad, these people trusted God and His will for their lives. In doing this their problems didn't magically disappear but they were able to find true joy by experiencing a peace that only God can give.

I also recently read a short article on Finding Joy Through Suffering. The part that really hit me was when the author wrote that "The crosses in our own lives are not ends, but means." I think in the end, the reason joy and pain are often found together is that it is only in surrendering what we cannot control, that we really will find true joy.