Unspeakable Joy

...though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory:  1 Peter 1:8 KJV

I saw that "unspeakable," unexplainable joy just after Christmas in 1981.  I was on a mission trip with a group of fellow college students in Matamoros, Mexico.  We were helping to build a church - spiritually and physically.  All of us had a part of the day that we worked on constructing a church building in a poor colonia on the edge of Matamoros; then we spent another part of the day surveying the spiritual interest in that colonia with a few Spanish phrases we were taught.

My team of three came up to a house and greeted the woman outside, she warmly welcomed us into her little home where  we met her grown daughter and her very sick grandchild.  She wanted us to pray for her grandchild but first the daughter told us her story.  I could gleam a word or two to get the gist of what she was saying and she would help  us out with an English phrase or two that she knew.

They were all Christians.  The child was given very little hope of living much longer.  The child and his mother had just moved there because the husband could not handle his child's illness and had left them.  It was a very sad story but all the time this young mother told us this, there was this incredible expression of joy on her  face, even through her tears.  She kept looking up as she spoke, her large brown eyes seemed to point to a higher place that that little, poor home.   I will never forget it.  We choked out a few prayers between us over the sick child, each of us taking turns as someone who had been praying got choked up.  We said our goodbyes and left information about the new church and took their names and the address for the colonia pastor.

We got out in the street, dried our eyes and talked about what we had just experienced - joy, in the middle of one of the saddest things I had ever seen.  Everyone on that team remarked about how we had just seen something we had never seen before.  There was such an expression of joy on her face even through her tears and even in her circumstances.

That evening our team tried to share what we had experienced during our mission team share time.  None of us could get through it without crying.  I am sure no one else really understood what we had seen but it did not change the fact that we had seen it.  It really was an "inexpressible" joy.

All of us would like to have that kind of joy.  None of us want the kind of circumstances that family was going through.  But perhaps that is where joy -this kind of joy that Peter was talking about - can best be seen and known, in places where it would not seem possible.

Sunday, we will look at the joy that is possible where ever we are, no matter what we are going through because it comes from Jesus.  Pray for me as we seek to understand this unspeakable joy.

For the journey...

Tim