God Restores Our Joy
Illustration
Stories
Contents
“God Restores Our Joy” by John Sumwalt
“Droning On About Drones” by Frank Ramirez
God Restores Our Joy
by John Sumwalt
Isaiah 65:17-25
For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating,
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy
and its people as a delight. (vv. 17-18)
Joy seems so simple when we have it. The laughter of children, a father singing as he tucks his daughter into bed, the hug of a grandmother, Sunday dinner with family, the triumph of a teenager winning a race, the contented sigh of an old dog asleep on the couch: simple things we take for granted until they are gone.
After four years of being homebound and unable to drive the car, I find great joy in being able to drive to the store for groceries or to run over to the hardware store to get a box of wood screws. Simple things.
I lost my joy for a time when I was battling mold illness and chronic Lyme disease. Both body and spirit withered. I missed going to church and to family gatherings. It took great effort to get out of bed, to take a shower, and it took a monumental effort to call a friend and to find the energy to carry on a conversation. It was a struggle to maintain my sense of self. My wife and family, our friends, our church and my doctors all struggled to hold me up as I sank deeper and deeper into that joyless pit that everyone who has endured debilitating illness knows too well.
After treatment at the Biologix Center for Optimum Health in Nashville, I felt my energy returning. Slowly my joy and passion for living has returned. I can tell ‘dad jokes’ again and laugh with our grandchildren. Simple joys.
Joy is a sense of the rightness of things. It is both a feeling and a deep-in-the-soul kind of knowing that all is well. We don’t think much about it until it is lost. The Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman, said to a friend one day, “I’m about to lose my joy. I can feel it physically. It’s running out. I’m just drying out inside.”
If you have ever lost your joy in life then you may have prayed this prayer, found in the 126th Psalm, by a people who had lost everything in a devastating war and were beginning to doubt that they would ever be whole again. The psalmist prayed: “Restore our fortunes, O Lord… May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.”
Restore my joy!
This is the desperate prayer we pray when all seems lost. O Lord, we cry out from the depths of sorrow after the tragic death of a loved one, when our whole being aches physically and spiritually for the one we have lost; restore my joy! It is the plaintive prayer that bubbles up out of a broken heart when we have separated from a spouse or a dear friend. It is the anguished, wordless cry, the inexpressible sorrow that erupts from within when we have lost our purpose in life, our reason for being. Restore my joy, we cry. And God does.
Paul Tillich writes in his meditation on this psalm that “joy is the expression of our essential and central fulfilment.” This is what God restores and it is something only God can do.
I once officiated at the funeral of a long-time church member whose beloved son, Edward, had died tragically at the age of 16. Her family told me that after Edward’s death, Violet cried every day for a year. And she would get up every day at 6:00 A.M. to visit his grave before she went to work. She cried so much that her tears ducts were beginning to dry up. They said one day Violet woke up and Edward was standing at the foot of her bed. He said, “Mom, you have got to stop this crying. I am where I am, and nothing is going to change that.” From that day on, Violet began to get better and was able to go on with her life, her joy restored.
* * *
Droning On About Drones
by Frank Ramirez
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Now we command you, beloved, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you… (vv. 7-8)
The queen bee is the largest insect in the hive by far, around ¾ of an inch in length, about twice the size of a worker bee. She also lives the longest, her lifespan roughly two to three years if she remains healthy and keeps laying eggs.
The workers, all of them female, are the most numerous, Over the course of their lives, eight weeks in the summer, five or six months while they cluster to stay warm in the winter, they keep busy as, well, bees. First, they tend to the larvae as soon as they emerge from their own brood cell. Then they help process honey by flapping their wings and curing nectar to the thick, dense sweetness that is impervious to decay and disease and which can last for centuries. They will cap the wax cells with honey is cured. They will draw out wax, creating row and row of perfect wax panels, 5/16th of an inch apart. Some will later take up guard duty near the hive’s entrance, ready to give up their lives when they sting an intruder who wanders too close, although to be fair they will usually fire a warning buzz or two when someone makes the mistake of coming too close. Fair’s fair.
In the last stage of their lives they will make a few trial flights to get their bearings, then will fly off two or three miles in order to bring back nectar and protein rich pollen, staples in the hive’s diet. Scout bees will communicate where these treasured substances can be found by dancing precise directions and sharing some of the nectar brought back to the hive. The more vigorous the dance, the greater the bounty awaiting the workers.
At last, exhausted, their wings worn down to a nubbin, they die.
In Shakespeare’s time, beekeeping was a prosperous activity. Surpluses of honey and wax were sent forth to strengthen the economy in trade. Shakespeare himself compared the hive to the well-ordered English society under Queen Elizabeth I.
For so work the honey bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts,
Where some like magistrates correct at home;
Others like merchants venture trade abroad;
Others like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds,
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold,
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate,
(Henry V, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare, like many in his day, mistook the queen for a king. The queen bee’s gender was not definitely proved until a few decades after his death.
Oh, and one more thing. In Shakespeare’s day, as now, it was clear that the male bees, known as drones, were pretty much worthless. They are larger than worker bees, buzz louder, have enormous eyes, and spend most of their days hanging around with drones from other hives near selected trees, buzzing and bragging at each other. They toil not, neither do they spin, as we may say, stealing a biblical phrase. Drones help themselves to all the honey they want, order worker bees to get out of the way, without ever doing a lick of work.
Their only job is to impregnate queen bees. When a young queen is newly hatched, she goes out on her one mating flight. When she approaches a tree where the drones hang out they will give chase. She will mate with several of them, allowing her to increase the genetic diversity of the hive. She then returns home and will never fly again.
Meanwhile, every drone that successfully mates dies in the process. So, all their bragging and buzzing together is just that — brag and buzz. Any drone alive to tell the tale did not succeed in passing along his DNA.
So, one could say it’s a drone’s life — at least until the fall, when the hive closes ranks and hunkers down for winter. Then, suddenly, the drones are unceremoniously driven out of the hive. They rant and rain against this injustice, attempting to force their way back in, but there is no mercy and no appeal. As Shakespeare puts it, the hive also includes judge, jury, and:
The sad-ey’d justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.
The Apostle Paul is at pains in this letter to counter any accusations that he is a drone. He was not idle during his stay in Thessalonica, he reminds me, and we can be fairly certain this was true because of the description of his stay in Corinth, where for eighteen months he worked at his craft of tentmaking and tent repair with his friends Priscilla and Aquila.
But the fact that it was a problem we can see in the early Christian manual for worship and practice known as the Didache, or, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. In chapter 12 of the Didache churches are admonished to welcome anyone coming in the name of the Lord, allowing them to stay two or three days. After that, they can work at their craft if they desire to stay and eat with their fellow Christians. If they don’t have a craft, the fellowship is to find some kind of work they can do. Otherwise they are, in the words of the document, “Christ Hucksters.”
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 13, 2022 issue.
Copyright 2022 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“God Restores Our Joy” by John Sumwalt
“Droning On About Drones” by Frank Ramirez
God Restores Our Joy
by John Sumwalt
Isaiah 65:17-25
For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating,
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy
and its people as a delight. (vv. 17-18)
Joy seems so simple when we have it. The laughter of children, a father singing as he tucks his daughter into bed, the hug of a grandmother, Sunday dinner with family, the triumph of a teenager winning a race, the contented sigh of an old dog asleep on the couch: simple things we take for granted until they are gone.
After four years of being homebound and unable to drive the car, I find great joy in being able to drive to the store for groceries or to run over to the hardware store to get a box of wood screws. Simple things.
I lost my joy for a time when I was battling mold illness and chronic Lyme disease. Both body and spirit withered. I missed going to church and to family gatherings. It took great effort to get out of bed, to take a shower, and it took a monumental effort to call a friend and to find the energy to carry on a conversation. It was a struggle to maintain my sense of self. My wife and family, our friends, our church and my doctors all struggled to hold me up as I sank deeper and deeper into that joyless pit that everyone who has endured debilitating illness knows too well.
After treatment at the Biologix Center for Optimum Health in Nashville, I felt my energy returning. Slowly my joy and passion for living has returned. I can tell ‘dad jokes’ again and laugh with our grandchildren. Simple joys.
Joy is a sense of the rightness of things. It is both a feeling and a deep-in-the-soul kind of knowing that all is well. We don’t think much about it until it is lost. The Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman, said to a friend one day, “I’m about to lose my joy. I can feel it physically. It’s running out. I’m just drying out inside.”
If you have ever lost your joy in life then you may have prayed this prayer, found in the 126th Psalm, by a people who had lost everything in a devastating war and were beginning to doubt that they would ever be whole again. The psalmist prayed: “Restore our fortunes, O Lord… May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.”
Restore my joy!
This is the desperate prayer we pray when all seems lost. O Lord, we cry out from the depths of sorrow after the tragic death of a loved one, when our whole being aches physically and spiritually for the one we have lost; restore my joy! It is the plaintive prayer that bubbles up out of a broken heart when we have separated from a spouse or a dear friend. It is the anguished, wordless cry, the inexpressible sorrow that erupts from within when we have lost our purpose in life, our reason for being. Restore my joy, we cry. And God does.
Paul Tillich writes in his meditation on this psalm that “joy is the expression of our essential and central fulfilment.” This is what God restores and it is something only God can do.
I once officiated at the funeral of a long-time church member whose beloved son, Edward, had died tragically at the age of 16. Her family told me that after Edward’s death, Violet cried every day for a year. And she would get up every day at 6:00 A.M. to visit his grave before she went to work. She cried so much that her tears ducts were beginning to dry up. They said one day Violet woke up and Edward was standing at the foot of her bed. He said, “Mom, you have got to stop this crying. I am where I am, and nothing is going to change that.” From that day on, Violet began to get better and was able to go on with her life, her joy restored.
* * *
Droning On About Drones
by Frank Ramirez
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Now we command you, beloved, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you… (vv. 7-8)
The queen bee is the largest insect in the hive by far, around ¾ of an inch in length, about twice the size of a worker bee. She also lives the longest, her lifespan roughly two to three years if she remains healthy and keeps laying eggs.
The workers, all of them female, are the most numerous, Over the course of their lives, eight weeks in the summer, five or six months while they cluster to stay warm in the winter, they keep busy as, well, bees. First, they tend to the larvae as soon as they emerge from their own brood cell. Then they help process honey by flapping their wings and curing nectar to the thick, dense sweetness that is impervious to decay and disease and which can last for centuries. They will cap the wax cells with honey is cured. They will draw out wax, creating row and row of perfect wax panels, 5/16th of an inch apart. Some will later take up guard duty near the hive’s entrance, ready to give up their lives when they sting an intruder who wanders too close, although to be fair they will usually fire a warning buzz or two when someone makes the mistake of coming too close. Fair’s fair.
In the last stage of their lives they will make a few trial flights to get their bearings, then will fly off two or three miles in order to bring back nectar and protein rich pollen, staples in the hive’s diet. Scout bees will communicate where these treasured substances can be found by dancing precise directions and sharing some of the nectar brought back to the hive. The more vigorous the dance, the greater the bounty awaiting the workers.
At last, exhausted, their wings worn down to a nubbin, they die.
In Shakespeare’s time, beekeeping was a prosperous activity. Surpluses of honey and wax were sent forth to strengthen the economy in trade. Shakespeare himself compared the hive to the well-ordered English society under Queen Elizabeth I.
For so work the honey bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts,
Where some like magistrates correct at home;
Others like merchants venture trade abroad;
Others like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds,
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold,
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate,
(Henry V, Act 1, Scene 2)
Shakespeare, like many in his day, mistook the queen for a king. The queen bee’s gender was not definitely proved until a few decades after his death.
Oh, and one more thing. In Shakespeare’s day, as now, it was clear that the male bees, known as drones, were pretty much worthless. They are larger than worker bees, buzz louder, have enormous eyes, and spend most of their days hanging around with drones from other hives near selected trees, buzzing and bragging at each other. They toil not, neither do they spin, as we may say, stealing a biblical phrase. Drones help themselves to all the honey they want, order worker bees to get out of the way, without ever doing a lick of work.
Their only job is to impregnate queen bees. When a young queen is newly hatched, she goes out on her one mating flight. When she approaches a tree where the drones hang out they will give chase. She will mate with several of them, allowing her to increase the genetic diversity of the hive. She then returns home and will never fly again.
Meanwhile, every drone that successfully mates dies in the process. So, all their bragging and buzzing together is just that — brag and buzz. Any drone alive to tell the tale did not succeed in passing along his DNA.
So, one could say it’s a drone’s life — at least until the fall, when the hive closes ranks and hunkers down for winter. Then, suddenly, the drones are unceremoniously driven out of the hive. They rant and rain against this injustice, attempting to force their way back in, but there is no mercy and no appeal. As Shakespeare puts it, the hive also includes judge, jury, and:
The sad-ey’d justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.
The Apostle Paul is at pains in this letter to counter any accusations that he is a drone. He was not idle during his stay in Thessalonica, he reminds me, and we can be fairly certain this was true because of the description of his stay in Corinth, where for eighteen months he worked at his craft of tentmaking and tent repair with his friends Priscilla and Aquila.
But the fact that it was a problem we can see in the early Christian manual for worship and practice known as the Didache, or, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. In chapter 12 of the Didache churches are admonished to welcome anyone coming in the name of the Lord, allowing them to stay two or three days. After that, they can work at their craft if they desire to stay and eat with their fellow Christians. If they don’t have a craft, the fellowship is to find some kind of work they can do. Otherwise they are, in the words of the document, “Christ Hucksters.”
*****************************************
StoryShare, November 13, 2022 issue.
Copyright 2022 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
