Got joy?

To start off the journey of blogging, I want to write a little about what joy is and why I think it is so important. As I wrote in the "About" page on my blog, joy is my favorite thing. To me, joy is a happiness which points to the divine. It is a stir in your heart that connects you to God. It is what every heart longs for but often times it gets lost trying to seek it. Joy has played a huge role in my life in that it has brought the light and beauty into the "greyest moments" of my life. It has helped me to appreciate the little things and recognize the power they hold.

I want to take you back to day one. Back to the beginning of time, shortly after time itself was created. What God created was perfect. He looked at every single thing He created and saw that it was good. When He created man, He saw they were *very* good. (Genesis 1:31). When sin entered the world, it created a void where the goodness should have been. Saint Augustine of Hippo writes, “All which is corrupted is deprived of good.” (Augustine, Confessions, VII: [XII] 18). In other words, evil—or sin—is the absence of good.

To expand further, we all, due to sin, are created with a void inside of us—a longing for true goodness. It is what drives us to yearn for God: the ultimate Good. He is what satisfies the longing and fills the void. Yet, my favorite part is that He doesn’t just fill the gap, the void, the emptiness… He overpours with abundance and we have way more than we could ever make up for ourselves.

This is where joy comes in. When we are filled not only to the brim of what we desire and need, but overflowing with goodness, the result is joy. You cannot help but be overwhelmed with a sort of “next level happiness” if you will. Joy is unexplainable. It transcends “feeling” and it taps into something deeper in your soul. It is totally and completely connected to the divine. It’s a free and peaceful feeling that replaces every area of emptiness to exist in your being.

This—this is why I love joy. It is something so good it is unexplainable. It is something that God has gifted me to be able to seek and attain even in the hardest parts of my life. My “journey to joy” consists of finding it in the little things, but also sharing those “little things” with those who I encounter. Each blog, each art piece... every single thing I make brings me joy and gives me an opportunity to share it with you so that you too may be able to have joy.

So, got joy? :)