I wanted to go ahead and get a digital version of our time together up on the blog for everybody to peruse. I have really enjoyed taking in each others' responses, and I hope you will too.
For those who weren't able to make it, we spent some time discussing various perspectives on what 'joy' might be. For many of us, the word itself feels sort of antiquated; it's not one that we toss around in everyday conversation very often. What does it mean that Jesus' coming to our world brought joy? It seems that in contrast to the fleeting nature of 'happiness', 'joy' inherently has an element of fulfillment... that when we experience joy we're communing with the core of who/what God created us to be and take in. It comes in myriad moments and forms. It seems to be independent of happiness, quite often. It can also be a mindset and/or discipline (see the previous post by Carrie).
We then shifted our discussion to Rob Bell's Jesus is Difficult: Beatifully Angry sermon. We spent some time recounting Rob's point about how identifying the things in the world that make us beautifully angry can often give us insight into how God wired us individually and what he wants us to address in this world. Ultimately it seems that when we identify and address the things that make us angry, we end up finding another way to create and experience joy/fulfillment for ourselves and the people around us.
We wrapped up the evening with an "ideation session." The session progressed through three questions, the results of which are reproduced in the images below. [click to enlarge]
1. How have you/do you experience joy?
2. What makes you [beautifully] angry?
3. What are you going to do with your beautiful anger to find/create joy?
3 comments:
Adam! I can't thank you enough for knocking yourself out on this. What a cool visual way of representing what you guys came up with. We miss you all this past week and I'm super grateful for the time you spent on this - making sure we get to feel like we were there even if we weren't!
loved this! such beautiful and powerful thoughts shared...thanks for posting!
Tara and Adam... great job in leading us in Advent worship and thought last Sunday. The pics on the blog are a WONDERFUL visual representation of the ideation session. The topics of our conversation, joy and anger, came together beautifully. Thanks for posting this follow up!
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