🙌It's the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

I've been praying specifically for "the joy of the Lord" for our family this week. Our autistic son is in a kind of burnout I never knew a child could experience. He is home with me full time and has almost no ability to access to himself, relationships, or any measure of delight. Paradoxically, our household feels like we're walking on eggshells AND our legs have been cut off at the knees.

Since interceding for joy, the meltdowns and heartbreaking moments still happen... But joy entered too. Joy that felt foreign. Joy that didn't match, didn't fit, and didn't "fix"anything either. Honestly, it gave me false hope at first. Maybe this would end soon. Maybe the intensity would let up a little. But that's not it.

The joy of the Lord isn't the absence of hardship. It's the nearness of Christ.

This week, the joy of the Lord looked like brothers playing together for the first time in a long time... Like two little boys tackling each other relentlessly and then walking hand in hand. It's shown up with Coke bottle bowling in the backyard and progressed to creating and filming "trick shots". Oh, the giggling... the delight... the JOY when that trick shot landed.

Of course I want the hardship to pass. In my family and yours. I want suffering to stop. I think I want to feel like a "normal" person in a "normal" family - whatever that means. God wanted suffering to end so much He sacrificed His own Son. That is NOT "normal". But that is the family I want to belong to.

There will be storms, sometimes debilitating ones. But what a privilege to carry the seal of a healed, whole, victorious family within us through the Holy Spirit and have tastes of joy amidst our pain. (2 Cor 1:22)

"For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)

Thank You, Father, for the joy of the Lord this week.

Feel His Truth in your soul today. Listen to "God is Good" by Phil Wickham and CAIN.