Joy.

I am a lover of traditions. I love anticipating their arrival and the rhythm they bring to each new season of life. But traditions don’t just inherently exist, they must be created and lived out. So, as I have been building a life of my own the past few years, it has both terrified me and excited me that I am now the one responsible for carrying on traditions and building new ones.

A tradition of my own I’ve followed for the past few years has been choosing a “word for my year” – one year it was brave, the next year obedience, and last year presence. This year I chose JOY.

Throughout the years, I have carried these words with me. I’ve explored them in depth and searched for them around me. Finding moments to be brave, figuring out what the heck it means to be obedient and how to be more present.

The first year I was clueless as to how I wanted this to look. So, I sat in my bed with a journal and started writing down words I wanted to be true of my life. After I had a list, I looked up each definition and wrote them down next to the word. I began running through the words and noticing which one my eyes kept hovering over and crossing out the ones that were becoming uninteresting. I asked myself if I felt my life was already marked by that word or if there was space for new exploration of what it meant to be _(*insert whatever words were left here*)_.

Now as I have done this for the past few years, usually around November/December a word or two begin to swirl in my mind. Like unescapably so. Enough to where I take notice and begin to ponder whether that word is meant for the upcoming new year.

But joy. That was an interesting pick.

Without going too much into detail, let’s just say last year around November I had very little joy. It had been a tough year and there didn’t seem to be any space for me to feel anything but sad. So you can imagine my surprise when I kept hearing the word joy in my head. It was laughable. Me? Explore joy in 2022? No thank you.

But boy oh boy, the word was persistent. I began receiving gifts from people with the word joy written across it in beautiful lettering, people who had no clue that I even picked words for my year. Mugs, pajamas, ornaments, hand towels. I began to think I might be missing out on something God had for me if I ignored the clear invitation to explore this word.

So I took a leap of faith and thought maybe I could learn how to find joy in hard places. Or maybe I would realize that joy on this side of heaven is a myth after all (hello cynical gal). Or just maybe (the smallest little part of me hoped) I would rediscover joy for myself.

I can’t believe I am typing this but 2022 ended up being one of the most joyful years of my life. I got back on stage for the first time since the world shut down, I started a small business, I fell in love. And I wonder how much more I enJOYed alllll of that because I was searching for the joy within it. I wonder if joy is more than just the outcome of an event that happens but rather a feeling we get to find and recognize and choose. I want to share more of what I learned about this word (& I will) but this year I felt curious about other people’s relationship with the word joy.

I’ve asked 5 people who I love and admire to have conversations with me around the word JOY. I sent them questions and gave them 15 minutes to choose whichever questions spoke to them personally and discuss them. And oh my goodness, it has been so fun. Over the next few weeks I am going to share written excerpts from each of these conversations in hope that it encourages you to seek the joy surrounding you. Because if there is one big thing I can take away from these conversations and my year exploring the word joy, it’s that joy has been there all along. It’s up to us to find it.