The Pursuit
A ONE Church Devotional from Ghana
Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” (Nehemiah 8.10)
Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! (Philippians 4.4)
“To miss joy, is to miss all.” When Robert Louis Stevenson penned this strong claim, he may have overstated; but I think not. The psalmist didn’t think so either, when he wrote, “The joy of the Lord is my strength.” Nor did the Apostle Paul, when he exhorted his Philippians with another encompassing word…and then repeated it for emphasis: “Rejoice in the Lord always! And again I say ‘Rejoice!’” No less a theologian than the brilliant medieval scholar and churchman, Thomas Aquinas, once proclaimed, “A person cannot live without joy.” In fact, when another Thomas (i.e., Jefferson) wrote that humans are “endowed with” a right to “the pursuit of happiness”, I wonder if he might have meant “joy”.
Yesterday, I got to go with some friends on a sort of joy ride through Ghana. In the morning, we found ourselves in the middle of a blessedly chaotic free-for-all with hundreds of small children. I’d say “we danced and sang”, but you wouldn’t get the picture. This was a twenty-minute extravaganza of motion and sound, with nine white American visitors literally swept away in a sea of beaming black faces.
This unbridled merriment, we learned, is an everyday occurrence in the “Cities of Refuge Ministries” school that we visited. As all this played out, I wanted to touch up John the Seer’s exalted vision of the company before God’s throne room in Revelation 7. John famously wrote,
“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”
If Ghana and the Asante and Ewe and Akan had been among his nations and tribes, contagious dancing and singing would surely have animated that standing multitude. These kids could DANCE! (Note: the photo above is not of the City of Refuge Ministries kids, to protect their privacy. But you get the picture!)
The dance fever doesn’t stop. At every age and stage, Ghanaians DANCE! In fact, the IJM friend Richard, who welcomed us on Sunday at the airport prepared us during our first lunch: “When Ghanaians are very happy, we dance and sing. And when Ghanaians are very sad, we dance and sing. And with most emotions between those two, we dance and sing.”
Who doesn’t want this kind of joy?!
As I slipped back into my seat in the chapel, sweaty, breathless, and joyous, I had a profound sense of deja vu. My mind was drawn back two decades to a similar experience of such plentiful joy – on a fantastic journey with Plymouth Church in Seattle to our sister church in Managua, Nicaragua. As we worshipped and learned and broke bread together with the people of Iglesia Morava (Moravian Church), we didn’t dance. But the experience of joy was the same.
The deja vu that linked a black African primary school with a brown Latin American congregation was their common circumstances. Many of yesterday’s young dancers live in the sort of poverty that we have observed this week by roadsides and in slums of Accra, and many of our Nicaraguan friends lived in makeshift homes with dirt floors. In a Ghanaian school and a Nicaraguan church I experienced a light so bright that it could not be dampened by meager means.
Now back to the two Thomases I quoted above and that famous “pursuit”. I believe that many in American culture have settled for a sad substitute for the Preamble’s “happiness” or the psalmist’s and Paul’s “joy”. Our Thomas (i.e. Aquinas) actually diagnosed us eight centuries ago when he spoke the line above. After insisting that “a person cannot live without joy”, he added a disturbing commentary: “Therefore when people are deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that they become addicted to carnal pleasures.”
Yesterday I got to go with some friends on a joy ride through Ghana – and it had nothing at all to do with the acquisition of things.
Ponder this, friends, and have a thoroughly thrilling Thursday!
Prayer – God of joy, inflame our hearts with your presence. Direct our pursuit of the true happiness that is the joy of the Lord, in Jesus. Amen.