To be delighted

In the past few weeks I feel as though I’ve come out of a cave. I didn’t even realize I had been in a cave, but sometimes it’s hard to see how dark something is until you emerge. All of the sudden, it was as if the light was switched on and I was delivered from that cold, dark, and dank place.

This is probably sounding more dramatic than it felt while I was in it. For the past year or so, it has been business as usual. I took care of our kids, who range in age from 16 down to one. I helped run a writing school. I homeschooled and homemaked (homemade?). I attended a vibrant church and engaged with our amazing community.

I was still doing all the things, but it felt like I was slogging through mud.

I cried a lot. The days were hard. Seven children are a lot, it’s true. The needs of my children varied widely from one getting a drivers license to another with poopy diapers that needed changed.

I tried to console myself.

Of course it’s hard.
Look at the season you’re in.
This is likely the thinnest you will ever been stretched.

Now delivered of this malaise, I can see that what I actually lacked in this past season was delight.

There was fruit in that cave. I learned a lot about relying on God, and being OK with who He made me to be. I had to trust Him on days when it looked like everything else was falling apart.

Now I have a toddler who is getting easier by the day. His slightly older brother will be 4 tomorrow and is much more obedient than he was a year ago. My big kids are finding their routines, and we have settled into a good rhythm as a family again (babies can really disrupt things for awhile).

But, I know that what has really happened is that God broke something off of me in the last few weeks. Something that I couldn’t even really see until it was gone. It’s like suddenly, the burden of the past year or two has just melted off. I feel encouraged and hopeful again…suddenly.

In that cave it’s so easy to only see how dark it is. To look up and see those drippy, slimy walls and the bats hiding out in the corners and feel hopeless in all that darkness. But sometimes, just a pinprick of light seeps in and then we follow it. And once we follow it we’re outside again and hope arises.

We find ourselves delighted again.

What is delight? Is it finding joy and contentment in all things? Perhaps it’s just like Paul said in Phillipans 4:11: I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content.

Contentedness leads to a delightful life.

The past few weeks I’ve found delight in my daily routine. What just a month ago I wanted to escape, I now want to engage. My kids are still kids— they whine, cry, and are at times disobedient. But in those moments I don’t feel the crushing weight of despair anymore, for I know that I know that God is good and He is with me.

I can choose delight instead of despair.

While I couldn’t find any hard linguistic origin evidence for this, I think it’s fascinating that the word delight is literally de-light. Of the light. When we choose delight we are choosing Jesus and trusting that His plan and His way is better than anything we could ever choose for ourselves.

We can either choose to accept that He made us in his image and be content, or choose to fuss about why we are the way we are and find despair.

Years ago I went through what I call my “Catholic phase”. This, surprisingly, does not refer to my Catholic childhood, but instead the time about a decade ago that I read from many different Catholic writers. Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen— that was healing time in my life and that felt like mashup of my upbringing and my growing Christian faith.

I liked all those guys. They have such good and insightful things to say, but Dorothy Day was my absolute favorite. At the time, we lived in a broken old house in a forgotten inner city neighborhood and Dorothy had a great heart and ministry for the poor and neglected. She inspired me.

I pored over her writings during that season in a book aptly name “The Duty of Delight”. I’ll leave you with a quote from that book, which was a collection of Dorothy’s journals.

“How necessary it is to cultivate a spirit of joy. It is a psychological truth that the physical acts of reverence and devotion make one feel devout. The courteous gesture increases one’s respect for others. To act lovingly is to begin to feel loving, and certainly to act joyfully brings joy to others which in turn makes one feel joyful. I believe we are called to the duty of delight.” -Dorothy Day