Surprised by Joy

One night this past summer, much like most nights, I laid in bed and instead of sleep, I found emptiness to be my embrace. As I stared at the popcorn texture on the ceiling of my bedroom, I wondered how I ever ended up in this place. I didn’t mean my apartment but in the state of emptiness that I now felt consumed by.

Michala, Mary Grace, and I had recently visited my childhood home of Pawleys Island, SC. While we stuffed ourselves on ribs and boiled peanuts, our sense of awe was also filled with the breath-taking beauty of the South Carolina lowcountry. Some folks think us South Carolinians are arrogant (and they are probably right) but it is hard not to have a pride of life living in a place with such a sense of mystique.

Located a few miles north of Pawleys is an old plantation that has been reinvented as an enormous sculpture garden called Brookgreen Gardens. Leaving Mary Grace with her Papa Johnny, Michala and I set out to continue our gluttonous consumption of beauty, and we were not disappointed. Brookgreen is larger than life, spanning 9,000 acres and several miles of coast upon the Waccamaw River. Michala and I forgot about the 90 plus degree weather coupled with an almost surreal level of humidity as we walked beneath the limbs of 300 year-old, moss draped live oak trees. We felt like kids again in this wonderful place, as if we had walked through a wardrobe to get to this Narnia.

Yet the one thing that most struck me, seared my soul even, was the sculpture entitled “Frog Baby” (pictured above, click to enlarge). In this artist’s depiction of young boy’s reaction after he has snared two frogs, the frog baby gazes heavenward with a smile that leaves the viewer both inwardly renewed and yet haunted to the core. Most of the people in our group produced similar outward reaction, that of laughter mixed with a hint of scoff. Yet the boy’s face has not failed to leave me alone in the time since we met. In fact it is more of a haunting than anything, the way it stays with me.

I have been left to ponder why would this expression of sheer joy would be so haunting.

I saw that same face again later upon my daughter. As we were preparing for church one morning, I took it upon my self to dance with Mary Grace. I dipped and dunked as she held on to me, curious as to what brought on such silliness and then I spun her around. At first her face only knew shock, but that was quickly wiped away by joy, leaving me looking into the smile of the frog baby.

The feeling I felt at that moment can best be described as mourning. I saw a ghost of myself reflected in her pure joy. That afternoon, I weaped, thankful for my daughter’s innocence but also despairing the death of my childhood. After choosing to follow Jesus just over 5 years prior, I was told that one of the core markings of His followers would be joy, and yet not only did joy seem like a distant memory, I feared I would never again taste its sweetness.

Not content to accept my joyless fate, I began to ask myself and God some hard questions. What is Joy? Where does Joy come from? How can I be happy in the midst of so much suffering in the world? Will I ever feel Joy again? And to my surprise, I began to find answers and even a bit of joy as well. The next four Mondays, I will be exploring the questions I asked and the answers I found. Join me in asking the hard questions for which only silence in the presence of God can bring relief. Join me in the joy of discovering ourselves surprised at just how good the answers and our God can be.

Michael is a student at Denver Seminary. His wife Michala, is the Director of Children’s Ministry at The Neighborhood Church.

A Tree Called Home

By Michael Gallup

I’m not sure why everytime I think of home, I feel compelled to describe the Spanish Moss-draped oak trees. I feel the need to become rather verbose and compare the moss to trapped spirits of the men and women damned to never leave the lowcountry (I could think of worse fates). But simply put, nothing speaks of the area like the oaks. These ancient giants with their gnarly knotted elbows meandering to and fro are the epitome of the grandeur and history that so defines the lowcountry of South Carolina. They belong to a rare group of items like the mountains of Colorado and the sea, that no matter how many times you see them they still inspire awe.

As a kid they held a certain mystery for me, that if they could talk, God himself would pull up a seat to listen. Yet they also had a laziness about them. The oaks have the appearance of the rivers they surround, a fluidty that can be rather mesmerizing. When they have reached the grandfather stage of life, their limbs will rest on the ground much like a cane. But most of all, I must speak of them because they are home, as much as mom is even.

Yet, I have been cut off from that land, somewhat by choice and somewhat by force. And this saddens me because my blood has a brown tint to it thanks to those muddy rivers that these oaks line. I know worthless tidbits of history about the plantations that inhabited the land before me, but it is not my home anymore and I wonder if it ever truly was.

Even though I was born on the banks of the black river in Georgetown much like my father before me, I always felt a stranger. My great-granddad wasn’t a rebel and I’d lie straight through my teeth about the fact the my Grandfather was from Pennslyvania. If anyone ever discovered that fact, I’d quickly remind them my mom was from Arkansas. Yet I lived in a place where my friends last names matched those of the plantations and even though this heritage wasn’t always flaunted, I was always on the outside looking in.

Home is a funny place. The cliché is that it is where the heart is, but that is too vague for my sensibilities. I need a place to call home and I think that I am not alone in this quest, that one way to describe our existence is that it is a search for place, for home. The religious thing to say is that God or heaven is our homes and that is not far from the truth as I can see it.

When I think of home, I think of mom and our gardens and a tree. Is it fair to guess that those things stick out because deep in all of us is a longing for a Father, a garden and a tree; a longing for a place that though we may stare into it for eternity it will never cease to inspire awe?

Michael is a student at Denver Seminary who’s greatest accomplishment in life was marrying way up to his beautiful wife Michala, the Director of Children’s Ministry at The Neighborhood Church. Michael has a blog called a A Sprig of Hope where he shares devotional thoughts on life, short stories, poetry, prayers, and anything that grabs his short attention span.