JOY

Nicholas Flatoff photo

C.S. Lewis calls Joy “a kind of love.”

He writes, “I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again.”

Lewis spent much of his pre-Christian life desiring to find Joy. And what he eventually found is that it wasn’t Joy itself he needed to find, but its Source. When Lewis wasn’t looking, even though he was looking—but in the wrong direction—he was surprised by Joy.

As he tells it,

“There was no strain of music from within, no smell of eternal orchids at the threshold, when I was dragged through the doorway…” by, and to, the Source of Joy, God Himself. “I found it (Joy) to be a person,” writes Lewis, who adds that Joy “might be one of the demands, might be the very first demand, He would make upon me.”

“Then will I go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight.” Psalm 43:4