“Don’t postpone joy.” When I first read it, I couldn’t read it. It was a bumper sticker in scripty font that made me squint really hard to see what it said. It didn’t help that it was on a bright yellow car and the sticker blended in just enough to make it difficult to read in the morning light. At a stop light with nothing else to do, I was proud of myself when I finally figured out the puzzle. Then it hit me. Don’t postpone joy.
It’s been a hard year. I’ve written here several times, and several times more to go, about how I walked through the valley of the shadow of death with my sister. She left the valley. I remained behind.
I know there are cycles to grief – anger, denial, shock, depression, acceptance. Nobody told me you could experience all of those in one day.
I remember crying between newscasts with my eyes so full of salty tears that I could barely see the computer screen in front of me. My mom knew it had been a particularly rough day. She called to tell me that there was no way I could go to work like that. I was already *at* work and I had to push through. One step at a time. Grief just hits at odd times sometimes – when a song comes on a radio station, when a stranger stops to be kind, a funny memory.
My mom said it had happened to her, too. She went to a GI doctor and the nurse asked her how she was feeling. The nurse obviously meant how was she feeling physically, but she got an entirely different response than she was expecting. My mother said she started crying and said, “I feel sad.”
In a year where we had Covid, shutdowns, quarantines, no school for my kids for a few months, a struggling new business, a tree on my childhood home thanks to the multiple tropical storms… it seemed it was one thing after another. I couldn’t catch a breath before the next blow would come.
But there God was with me in the car, saying, “Don’t postpone joy.” Don’t wait. Don’t wait for things to be “normal” again… they will never be normal again. Don’t wait til Covid is gone, it’ll be something else. Don’t wait for financial security; financial security isn’t secure. A perfect marriage. A perfect family. A perfect house. None of those things actually exists.
So what am I waiting on?
I forgot about that bumper sticker, but I heard God whisper it again a few days later. Except I had lost the words. Something to do with “joy.” Was it, “Don’t delay joy”? Was it something about *having* joy? I had lost it.
I was walking across the parking lot of our family business later that week when I saw the bumper sticker plain as day, in a nice, bold, fat font on the back of a little blue car. DON’T POSTPONE JOY.
I knew the owner of that car and she was standing just inside. I raced in, “Mrs. Ann! Mrs. Ann! Your bumper sticker. It spoke to me this week!” I explained I had seen it on another car just a few days earlier but had forgotten the words and needed them to come to me, and they did exactly that.
“It’s impossible,” she explained. There was only one bumper sticker. And it was hers. Her husband had had it made for her, just for her. She loved the expression after meeting a woman in Asheville who made it her life’s motto. You see, this woman had cancer and was dying, but she owned a coffee shop in North Carolina. She used the expression at her business to express just how she intended to live life while she was dying. Mrs. Ann loved the thought and her husband had a bumper sticker made with the saying, as a reminder.
In a time where the news and media are telling you to postpone life and Thanksgiving and holidays – and joy - I say, don’t. Don’t wait for the perfect moment to love, to laugh, to cry and to be with your family. Oh, I would give anything, any risk, any opportunity to have one more holiday with my sister. There will never be another holiday where we will ALL be together again. I may say on the air that the CDC warns you should stay home this holiday season, but off the air, I say, GO. Go and live. Go be with your family. We need each other. Go fly a kite with your kids, make cookies, watch a movie, eat turkey and take a nap. Go breathe and live and, if you need to, grieve. It’s all part of living. But let’s live. And if we have to live, let’s find joy in it.
If you don’t know how to find joy in a memory or a song or a moment or a breath, then I know the author of Joy - the Joy-Giver, the Joy-Maker. We cannot find joy by looking around us. Even the steadiest of footings will crumble and fall. People will die, illnesses will happen, accidents destroy, but if we look up to what is consistent, we will find what we are looking for. So, eyes up.
I have lost a lot, but I remember that I have three children who love me. We gained a new puppy. Our chickens started laying eggs. My parents weren’t injured in the tree accident at their home. I have had extra time with my kids this year. I have a lot to be thankful for in a season of thankfulness.
What are you waiting for? What am *I* waiting for? Nothing. I wait for nothing. I choose Joy. I choose the Joy-Giver.
