Biography
The Rev. Dr. Lewis Smedes is an ordained minister in the Christian Reformed Church and was Professor of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, for many years. He’s the author of many books, including Forgive and Forget and Caring and Commitment, as well as articles in publications like Christianity Today and the Reformed Journal. Lew lives in Sierra Madre, California, where he continues to write and travel as a speaker who is much in demand. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date.]

  We encourage you to purchase Lewis Smedes' books through Amazon.Com 
  which will donate 15% of the purchase price back to the Chicago Sunday Evening Club 
          and 30 Good Minutes.

"You Were Made for Joy" 
I want to have a serious talk with you about joy.

The first thing I want to tell you is that you and I were made for joy. Joy is our birthright. We were created for it. And when we lost it, Jesus came to bring it back again. From start to finish, Jesus is all about joy. Just before He died, he turned to His disciples and said: "I have spoken all these things to you for one reason, that my joy may be in you and that your own joy may be abundant."

So we are not dealing here with fringe benefits to make a tough life a little more bearable. We are talking about the reason for our being alive today. If you have finally done everything you wanted to do, accomplished everything you have wanted to accomplish, and finally settled into some security, and you do not have joy in it, you have missed the whole point.

You were made for joy.

The second thing I want to say to you is this:

          MOST DAYS, JOY COMES IN SPITE OF SORROW.

Almost every silver lining has a cloud. If we have joy, it must often break through a thick cloud of sadness. If you wait for joy until you have no more sorrow, you may wait too long. Joy is not the absence of sadness. It is the feeling of gratitude we have for life even when part of it is sad.

Look through your windows on some sad days and you may wonder: If this the day that the Lord has made? Surely there must be some mistake. How can we rejoice and be glad in a day when so many people get clobbered by the messenger of misery?

The inspired Psalm writer awoke to the morning sun one morning and exclaimed: This is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it. Somebody today is looking at his or her life today and is saying: This is the day that the Lord made? Some day. My mother-in-law has Alzheimer's. My son is on drugs. My daughter is getting a divorce. My husband lost his job. Some sort of day this is.

Woody Allen looked at the world one gray day and concluded that there are two kinds of people -- the wretched and the miserable. Thank God if you are only miserable. He made us laugh with that line only because we have days when we think He may be half right.

The truth is that we make a big mistake if we think we can have joy without having some sadness with it. For one thing, even if you are sitting pretty, the suffering of other people could break your heart. For another thing, if you wait until you have no sadness in life, you will never have any lasting joy, because sadness will come your way sometime for sure. Joy can be ours only along with sadness and in spite of sadness.

So this leads me to the third thing I need to say to you:

          LASTING JOY COMES ON THE WINGS OF HOPE.

Hope is the key to joy in a hurting world. When you get down to brass tacks, we live in a kind of world where we need a powerful hope to get some lasting joy in our lives. Without hope, life freezes. Without hope, we die inside. No one can find a lasting joy unless he or she has hope.

I was deeply moved lately while I watched the movie "Awakenings." It was about a ward full of people whose bodies were caught in a death-like state of catatonic immobility brought on by encephalitis. A new drug called that was helping victims of Parkinson disease was tried on them. In massive doses. And quickly the ward came alive. People who yesterday lived in a rigid catatonic stupor were walking and talking, and playing the piano, and singing, and dancing and loving. An awakening. A resurrection.

But the disease outslugged the drug. And all the patients lapsed back into their rigid paralysis. An awakening that was too good to last. I watched and I wept. I got in my car and put my head on the steering wheel and wept some more. It was as if all the sadness of all the sad people around me came unbottled and I was flooded with sadness.

I felt a terrible need for something that takes us beyond the miracles of a wonder drug. I need a sure hope that life is going to win. I need a sure hope that love is going to win. I need the old story that Jesus Christ lives.
When the Gospel tells us that Jesus Christ lives, and that from his life a spiritual power flows into our world to give us hope, it gives us a strong reason for hope that life is going to win.

Life is going to win. This is hope.

My date book has become a parable about hope for me. When I get out a new one, I see page after page of blank squares, each representing a day of my life. Each square bounded by four solid lines. My job is to fill up each of the squares with all the things that I do every day. When I get one square nicely filled, at the magic moment of midnight, an invisible door opens and I am silently slurped into the next square where I do it all over again. My life - filling up the squares.

I have imagined how I would feel is one of those smart insurance statisticians said to me: Smedes, you have exactly thirty-nine more squares to fill. When you get to the thirty-ninth square, that will be all you get. Your last square. No more squares to fill.

What I want to know is this: What happens on the thirty-ninth square? There are two scenarios. One of hopelessness. The other of hope.

First, the scenario of hopelessness. When I get to the thirty-ninth square, those four solid lines will slowly move down on me, crush me, and vomit me into the earth where I will share my final days with decaying garbage.

Another scenario. The scenario of hope. When I get to the thirty-ninth square, those solid lines will evaporate and I will move into a new dimension of life with God. Life better than I could have imagined while I fretted to fill the squares of my earthly calendar.

Life is going to win. So is love. Love is going to win. What kind of love is it that can win out over violence and greed?

I have a parable that tells me what kind of live this is, and I am going to tell you my parable. But I need to tell you a little about my mother first. She was a nineteen-year-old farm girl in the province of Friesland in northern most Holland when she fell in love with a dreamer of a Frisian blacksmith. She married him and together they followed the immigrant dream of a better life in America. He stayed around for ten years, long enough to co-author five children with her, I being the last of them. And then he suddenly died and left her with the rambunctious lot of us. He was only thirty-one.

She did not have a relative -- not an uncle or an aunt or a cousin -- in the country. Not a single job skill. A very slippery hold on the English language. No Social Security. And five cranky little children to feed. It was tough going. I should also tell you that she was a good-looking woman and a person of great feeling, a woman with a powerful talent for love. And only thirty years old.

So to get to my parable. I was in Michigan visiting my mother who was in the hospital, the last time as it turned out, that I would see her alive. We talked about a lot of things we had never talked about before. And toward the end of one afternoon, I asked her a question that in the old days a discreet son would probably not ask his own mother.

"Mother, you were only thirty years old. You must have been terribly lonely. And you had to work so hard, you must have been so tired. Did you never want a man? A man who would take care of you. Talk with you. Make love with you? Did you not want a husband to live with?"

And she shot back her answer as if she wondered why it took anyone so long to ask it. "Yes, I wanted a man. I got terribly lonely. And I got so tired. Yes, I wanted a man. But I was afraid that if a strange man came into our family, he would not care for my children the way I did."

And that is my parable. It is about a love that takes the most legitimate passions, the most human desires, and puts them on the back burner, to care for the needs of the ones she loves.

This is my parable of the love that percolates up from the beating of the heart of God. This is the love that rose victorious inside the breast of the risen Christ. This is the love that He still pours out to us. This love is going to win.

Christ lives and Love and Live are going to win.

And in the words of the simple spiritual:

Life is going to win, brothers. Oh yes, Lord.
Live is going to win, sisters. Oh yes, Lord.
Joy is going to win, children. Oh yes, Lord. Oh yes, Lord.

Interview with Lewis Smedes
Interviewed by David Hardin

David K. Hardin: Lew, you talked to us about joy. As I sat listening to you, one of my observations was that the church is not terribly clear about liking a lot of joy. Services are serious and we are not supposed to laugh too much. What do you think about that?

Lewis B. Smedes: Joy comes very hard for many people. There is a lot of tough tragedy in people's lives. I think the church has got to promote honest joy, not a joy of denial, not a joy of making believe that life isn't tough, but with the possibility of joy in spite of it, breaking through that crust to know that even during the toughest of days, life is a gift.

Hardin: Isn't there something about holding life lightly because you can trust God in it?

Smedes: I heard a man pray one time, "Oh, Lord, help us to remember that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly." I love that. I take myself too heavily. I am working at joy. I am working at experiencing life as a beautiful gift, not as a burden, not as a job that has to be done, but as a great gift.

Hardin: Maybe it is easy to take life seriously in academia.

Smedes: I don't know whether it's more so in academia or not, David. I have been walking through the halls of corporations. People look pretty grim there, too. I have a notion that we lose joy for a lot of reasons. Some of us lose it because we catastrophize life.

When my middle son was a boy, we were driving in our station wagon somewhere on a bright, sunny day. He was wearing dark glasses and they broke and cut his cheek. He said, "I'm dying; I'm dying." Then with a pause, "I'm already dead."

A lot of people do that with their marriages, with their careers, with their hopes. When you give up hope, that is when you lose joy.

Hardin: I want to digress, although it's related. Your most recent book is A Pretty Good Person. What are you saying in that book?

Smedes: First of all, what I want to say in that book is this. The most important thing about us is not our skills but our characters; not what we can do, but what we are.

Then, judging from the title, I want to convince people that they don't have to be heroes or saints. Being pretty good is often about as good as most of us can manage and that is okay. Then, what I want to do is go on and describe what it would be like to be a person of courage, integrity, hope and love.

Hardin: Isn't it true we all are pretty good people. Even those who look like wonderful people have some problems. I have never met a person yet who didn't have a flip side of problems and negatives. The important thing is that they are capable of developing a good side.

Hardin: I think that is exactly right. Well, Lew, it's been great to have you with us.