Joy That Is Not Just “Making Do”

Others hear “God helps those who help themselves” and quietly put all the weight on their own shoulders, trusting mostly in their own effort and adding a prayer at the end. Neither is quite what Jesus describes.

He says, “Abide in me.” Abiding is not passive, and it is not self-reliant either. It is trust and participation woven together. Faith is the root, and our effort is the fruit that grows from it. A branch does not strain to produce grapes, but it does not refuse to bear them either. Joy, then, is not the absence of hardship. It is the steady confidence that we are not walking alone, and that confidence makes us willing to keep walking.

In today's world, which means doing our honest part, whether in work, family, or service, while holding the outcome with open hands. We pray, and we also show up.

From the Wayfarer's Diary

The bus gave up somewhere past noon.

It had been climbing for hours on a road that seemed carved into the mountain as an afterthought, narrow and dusty, with a drop on one side that none of us looked at for long. The engine coughed twice, shuddered, and went quiet. In the silence I could hear the wind moving through dry grass and a goat bell somewhere far below. There was no village in sight, and no signal on anyone's phone.

The driver climbed down, lifted the hood, and stared into the engine for a while, as men do when they hope the problem will explain itself. Then he shrugged and lit a cigarette. Inside the bus, the mood divided itself quickly. A man in a grey jacket began complaining loudly about the schedule, the company, and the government, in that order. Two young women scrolled uselessly through their phones. A few passengers simply stepped off, sat in the shade of the bus, and closed their eyes, resigned to whatever the afternoon would decide. I will admit I belonged somewhere between the complainers and the waiters. I was tired, and I was composing an unkind entry for this very diary.

It was then that I noticed the old woman in the third row.

She was small, wrapped in a faded green shawl, with hands as creased as old maps. She had boarded early that morning with a cloth bundle and a battered steel flask, and she had said almost nothing the whole way. Now she stood, smoothed her shawl, and climbed down the steps with the slow care of someone who has learned not to waste motion. She set her bundle on a flat rock, unscrewed the flask, and began to pour.

Tea. Sweet, dark, and still faintly warm, into small tin cups she drew one after another from the bundle, as though she had known all along there would be a need. She handed the first to the driver, who looked almost embarrassed to receive it. The second went to the man in the grey jacket, who, to my surprise, stopped mid-sentence. She worked her way around the group, asking nothing, and by the time the cup reached my hands, something in the air had softened. People were talking to one another instead of in the sky.

Then she looked at the bus, and at the slope behind it, and said something to the driver in a dialect I did not catch. He laughed, shook his head, and then seemed to think better of it. The road tilted gently downhill just behind us, but only a little, and the bus sat half on the crumbling edge. If it rolled the wrong way, we would not be having tea much longer. She wanted it to move to the flat stretch ahead, and she wanted every able pair of hands to do it.

She did not give orders, exactly. She simply pointed at two of us, the young man beside me and me, and then walked to the back of the bus and set her palms against the metal as if it were the most natural thing in the world. We looked at each other, put down our cups, and joined her. The driver took the wheel and got the brake ready. Others drifted over, one by one, until a dozen of us were leaning into a stubborn, sunbaked bus.

And while we pushed, she hummed.

It was a slow, tuneless sort of hymn, as far as I could tell, the kind that has been passed along so many times has lost its edges and kept its warmth. Between breaths, someone began to laugh. Then someone else joined the humming. The bus crept forward an inch, then a foot, then rolled onto level ground with a groan, and the whole road seemed to exhale.

We sat down again, dusty and a little ridiculous, and the old woman poured the last of the tea.

An hour passed, two. The sun slid lower and turned the hillside the color of honey. Eventually we heard it before we saw it: the grind of a truck laboring up the grade. It stopped beside us, and a broad-shouldered man leaned out of the window, took in the scene, and said only, “Everyone alive?” Within minutes he had a tow rope tied to our bumper, and by evening we rolled into the next village, tired, hungry, and strangely light.

I have thought about that afternoon many times since. She never doubted that help would come. I could see how she sat, how she poured, how she hummed. Yet she never once mistook that confidence for permission to be idle. She did what was in front of her: she shared what she had, she pushed when pushing was needed, and she trusted the rest to someone larger than the mountain.

That, I think, is what abiding looks like. It is faith that hums, and hands that still push.

                                                                                   "Faith that hums, and hands that still push".

Joy That Is Not Just “Making Do”

“Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.” Proverbs 8:30 (KJV)

“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” John 15:11 (KJV)

In Proverbs 8, Wisdom stands beside the Creator before the mountains were settled, “rejoicing in his inhabited world” and delighting in it day after day. In John 15:11, Jesus offers that same joy to us: “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” The invitation is to a life rooted in God's presence, never to one of simply getting by.

Most of us read this in one of two ways. Some hear “just have faith” and settle into waiting, as if heaven will arrange everything while we sit still.

A Closing Thought

Joy of the kind Jesus offers is not reserved for people whose roads are smooth. It is for the ones who keep their hearts turned toward God while the bus is broken, the schedule is lost, and the sky is wide and silent. Blind faith waits for rescue, and sheer effort carries the whole load alone. True faith does something braver. It pours the tea, puts its shoulder to the work, and sings, because it knows who is coming up the road.

So, aim high, not by gritting your teeth through life, but by walking with the Master and doing your part with gladness.

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