The question began a journey into joy.

Dallas had asked me to comment on The Divine Conspiracy as he wrote it. Every few months there would be a newly finished chapter in the mailbox. The explosive themes of the first two chapters—the invitation of Jesus to experience eternal living right now, the integration of our little kingdoms with the big Kingdom of God, the limitations of the gospels of sin management—challenged me deeply. But the opening theme of the third chapter did not. It evoked tremendous resistance.

In this chapter, Dallas shares his understanding of God. His starting point for his re-visioning of what God’s own life is like took me totally by surprise. He makes the bold claim that God “is the most joyous being in the universe.”Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 62. This unusual phrase stopped me in my tracks. I had never heard God described in this way before. And I simply could not accept it. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that I strongly rebelled against this notion of a joyful God. There were two reasons for this resistance as I think about it now.

On the one hand, I was reading these words against the background of apartheid South Africa. The suffering caused by this unjust system was overwhelming. It was hard picturing God being happy while millions were suffering from oppression. To do so would have seemed to strengthen the already prevalent idea amongst the oppressed that God didn’t really care about their situation. Personally I had become convinced that we needed a theology much more focused on the crucified God who suffers with us.

On the other hand, there was also a more personal reason. I did not rate very high on the joy-meter myself. Not only did the senselessness of the suffering around me take me to dark places in my own heart, my own temperament was constantly characterized by dissatisfaction and discontent. Those around me, especially Debbie, my partner in marriage, would frequently share concerns about my pessimistic outlook on life. Joy was definitely a stranger in my life.

But let me return now to that question. I remember the exact moment Dallas asked it. We were sitting together in a parked car outside the home of a friend. As we spoke about the third chapter of his book, I told him about my resistance to a joyous God. Recalling Bonhoeffer’s conviction that it is only the suffering God who can help us in our pain, I said, “I miss any reference to the crucified God. Surely God always suffers with us? How then can God be the most joyful being in the universe?” In his own typical way he responded to my questions with one of his own: “Trevor, is your God gloomy?”

His gentle question scorched its way into the depths of my mind and heart. Looking back now, I can see that it opened up significant new directions in my own thinking and living. When asked to reflect on how my relationship with Dallas had affected my life and ministry, I knew I wanted to tell the story of this question in my life. But before exploring this more fully, let me share my memories of my first meeting with Dallas. It was because of what he taught me through his own joyfulness that I was willing to take seriously what he taught about the joyous God

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01.  Our First Meeting

In 1985, I got sick with mumps. While recuperating in bed I came across an audiotape series of talks that Dallas had given the year before at an Africa Enterprise conference in the South African city of Pietermaritzburg. I had not heard of him before. But something in those teachings struck a deep, responsive chord. As I listened to him explore the themes of the accessibility of the kingdom of God, the substantiality of the spiritual, the connections between discipleship, daily life and mission—my longing to know, love, and follow Jesus burst into stronger flame.

I also knew that I wanted to spend time with Dallas. So I posted a handwritten letter, introducing myself and inviting him to come again to South Africa to share life with us and to teach in a number of different settings. I said that I could raise his airfare but could not offer hotel accommodation or promise any substantial honorarium. It was certainly not an attractive offer. To my surprise and delight, Dallas responded positively to this request from a complete stranger. Nor did we, he said, have to worry about any payment.

In August 1987, he endured the twenty-five-hour air trip from LA and landed at the Johannesburg airport. His three weeks were spent ministering in Cape Town, Kempton Park, and Johannesburg. But what struck me most during this time was not his words. It was his life in our midst. Dallas lived in the house of his own teaching. He was attentive to whomever was speaking with him. He listened carefully to our concerns in South Africa. He prayed for individuals between his teaching sessions. When we gave him an honorarium at the conference, I learned from a colleague working in an impoverished area that Dallas had given it to him!

And then there was his joyfulness. Whether it was listening to him singing on his own a favorite hymn or catching him in his room delighting in photographs of Jane, Becky, and John, or overhearing him talking with the Lord in our lounge at midnight, or standing quietly with him as the sun set over the lake, or watching him play with our young children, or enjoying a beer and spicy grilled chicken after a long day of ministry, there was a contagious joy about his presence. Thinking about this now, it was because of his embodied sense of overall well-being that his question carried such weight and authority, demanding from me serious thought, study, and reflection. Engaging it led me to rethink my picture of God and to reshape my way of life. Both of these changes became part of my journey into joy.

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02.  Rethinking My Picture of God

Our picture of God is critical in a number of respects. First of all, it profoundly affects the way we relate to God. If we have a vague, fuzzy, impersonal picture of God then our relationship with God usually turns out to be vague, fuzzy, and impersonal. Or if we picture God to be against us or always out to get us, it will be highly unlikely that we will want to get too intimate. Or if we feel that we have to earn God’s love, then we will spend our lives huffing and puffing trying to put ourselves into God’s good books. How we understand God influences powerfully the nature of our relationship with God.

But there is another reason why our picture of God is so important. Our picture of God rubs off on us. We become like the God we worship. If we believe that God is violent, we will tend toward aggression. If we understand God to be against certain people, we will be opposed to them as well. If we see God as overly serious, we will most probably come across as heavy ourselves. It would seem that we shape our picture of God, and then that picture of God shapes us.

For many years prior to the moment when Dallas asked me that question, I had been thinking through my picture of God. From painful, personal experience, I knew that much of our pain in life comes from our failure to think rightly about God. Thanks to the companionship of a wonderful psychiatrist, I had already been on a gradual journey from understanding God as someone whose love had to be earned to someone who loved me unconditionally.Trevor Hudson, Discovering Our Spiritual Identity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2010). Now Dallas’s question was causing another significant shift in my understanding of God to take place within me.

I started by going back to the Gospel life of Jesus. The bottom line of the Christian faith is the amazing claim that God has stepped into human history in the person of Jesus. If we want to get our picture of God clearer we need to continually look in the direction of Jesus. Through word and deed, dying and rising, Jesus introduces us to what God is really. With Dallas’s question echoing in my memory, I began to follow Jesus again through the Gospels, seeking this time to try to notice what I had missed before.

I already knew that according to the prophecies, he was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,” (Isaiah 53:3, ESVScripture quotations marked ”ESV” are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version, copyright 2001, Wheaton: Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.) the compassionate Friend who wept at Lazarus’s tomb, the vulnerable Savior who grieved over Jerusalem when entering the city riding on a donkey, the Crucified One who experienced the darkness of God-forsakenness. These images dominated my theology. Around them I developed my understanding of the God who always suffers with us in our suffering, weeps with us in our tears, and grieves with us in our grief. But now I knew that I needed to allow other images of Jesus to take their rightful place in my picture of God.

During my rereading of the Gospels, I was struck by how happy Jesus was. He lived with a strong, vibrant sense of the goodness of his Father, the Creator of the world. He seemed to have had the capacity to live fully in the present, giving his attention to the task in front of him, celebrating the presence of God here and now. He enjoyed parties, sharing meals, hugging children. He loved those around him fiercely and passionately. To cap it off, after explaining to his disciples how he would be the vine and they the branches, constantly drawing life from him, he said, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full’” (John 15:11, ESV).

Gradually, through this fresh seeing of the Gospel’s portrait of Jesus, I found myself becoming receptive to the idea of the joyous God. I began to imagine for the first time the joy that God must constantly experience— the joy in creating this expanding universe, the joy in continuously experiencing everything that is good and beautiful, the joy in loving you and me each moment of our lives. I also came to see that affirming the joy in God did not have to mean denying God’s presence in our suffering. I was beginning to understand that God is both the God of the crucified Jesus and the God of risen Christ who says to us something like:

 

I am Abba, your heavenly parent who looks at you with immense love and joy. I constantly delight in you and the world that I have made. Your presence is deeply desired at the family table of my friendship. When you hurt my other children through your actions and words I get angry, but my anger never robs me of my joy in loving you. On the cross I gave myself totally for you that you may know the full extent of my offer of forgiveness. Always know that your suffering is my suffering. Your grief is my grief. In your darkness and grief I am constantly at work, seeking to bring about for you another little joyful Easter. This is how much I love you.

 

This revisioning of God initiated significant changes for me. I started to ask God regularly to fill my life with the joy of Jesus. Inwardly, I gave myself permission to be happy even in the midst of painful circumstances. I began to see more clearly that if I was going to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice, I needed to be able to hold both these things together in myself. I even allowed myself the delightful thought that I brought joy to God. Sometimes, in the midst of my struggles, I would sense God saying, “Trevor, will you know that, even when things don’t go well, I rejoice in your attempts to live for me.”

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03.  Reshaping My Daily Life

As mentioned above I was not very good at joy. I was often heavy-hearted, for both personality and circumstantial reasons, and repeatedly would find life heavy going. Even after my ideas about a gloomy God started to change, there were still times when I would get very down. I knew enough about genuine character formation to realize that I could not sit back and expect God to fill my life with joy while I did nothing. Some careful thought would need to be given to how I could reshape my daily life in order for me to open my life to the joy of God.

Again Dallas was very helpful. On one occasion, after I had written to him describing my deeply ingrained struggle to embrace joy more fully, I received back a letter with wise and practical direction. Not only did his words communicate a kind acceptance of who I was, but they also offered me some clues regarding what I could do to receive more fully the joy of Jesus. Here is one paragraph from that letter:

 

Being discontent and always halfway disappointed is a part of what you are as a pilgrim on the earth. You are always going to feel like “arrangements,” whether family, church or state, even children, are sawdust and not bread. Very likely it derives from something—not “bad”—in your early experiences that formed your feelings and sentiment and left a gap in your sensitivities. Something it would take a revelation from God to make you know, and which you could do nothing about if you did know. Introspectiveness is part of your nature. It is not bad. Don’t fight it. Find sources of joy and cultivate them. Invest in them: time and money. . . . What things do you really enjoy? Things that have nothing to do with family, work or religion.Personal correspondence.

 

I frequently return to these words. They have helped me to see how I can think and live in a way more conducive to experiencing God’s joy. Let me explore three shifts in my thinking and living that continue to this day.

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04.  Celebrate More Joyfully My Own Existence

Dallas’s spiritual direction got me thinking in a different way about my own life. Somehow, his words encouraged me to celebrate my existence in this universe more joyfully. I didn’t need to fight the person I was. Being discontent and always halfway disappointed was part of who I was as a pilgrim on the earth. It did not mean that God had done badly with me or that there was something wrong with me or that I was inferior to any other person. God genuinely delighted in me! I could accept myself as I was.

Thinking about my life in this way has required much grace. We live in a world intent on getting us to be constantly dissatisfied with our lives. After all, how else would they sell us all that stuff? Often the voices around us telling us that we are not acceptable are very loud. Almost daily, we need the Holy Spirit to assure us in our hearts that we have been loved by God into existence. Each time I pray, I have been learning to ask for the grace to know more deeply that when God looks at me, God says, “I did well in giving you life. I did not make a mistake. You bring a smile to my face.”

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05.  Develop A Celebrate Life

By inviting me to invest time and money in sources of joy, I believe that Dallas was encouraging me to explore the neglected spiritual discipline of celebration. In one place, he describes spiritual celebration in this way: “We engage in celebration when we enjoy ourselves, our life, our world, in conjunction with our faith and confidence in God’s greatness, beauty, and goodness.”Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988), 179. Emphasis added. Biblically grounded in the book of Leviticus, where the people of God are instructed to set apart a tithe of their yearly produce, transport it to Jerusalem, and enjoy a feast in the Lord’s presence, celebration was a practice of which I had little firsthand experience.

But I began to learn here to reshape my life as well. Mealtimes became important daily celebrations where family and friends could share in conversation and laugh together; family birthdays and anniversaries were turned into occasions for fun and thanksgiving; week-ends away with Debbie at special places refreshed us in our love for each other. As I did these things, I consciously sought to enter into the joy of God whom I now knew was also enjoying these moments with me. Not surprisingly, after times like these I would often feel nourished in my faith and strengthened to take up the responsibilities of my daily life with greater love and joy.

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06.  Find God in All Things

Then Dallas’s counsel was intriguingly non-spiritual. There was no word to me about praying more, studying the Bible more, praising God more. While I knew that these activities were critically important for him, his approach to my predicament was much more indirect. I believe it also expressed his deep conviction that he once shared with me at another time, “Religion must never become your life. Your life needs to become your religion.” In the words of St. Ignatius, Dallas wanted me to learn how to experience God in all things, especially those things I enjoyed.

Overcoming this split between sacred and secular has perhaps turned out to be my deepest avenue of joy. I do not have to pepper my conversation all day long with religious expressions of praise and thanksgiving. What I can do is enter the present moment fully, live it as deeply as I can, and know God’s presence in it. After all, when I invite someone over to a meal that I have prepared, what brings me most joy is not when my guest praises me for what I have cooked, yet nibbles at it, but when they enjoy the meal and ask for more! Surely the same is true with God and God’s precious gift of life to each of us.

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07.  Foundation of Life

In closing, because of the journey Dallas’s question initiated for me, I now regard joy as a primary foundation of life in the kingdom of God. This joy flows from the vision of God as the most joyous being in the universe. Not only does God want to give us this joy, but we need to constantly seek it as well. Joy does not automatically happen to us. But knowing that the risen Christ has decisively overcome the powers of darkness and death, and that nothing can ultimately separate us from the reality of God’s loving presence, we can learn how to choose joy and so become one of those joyous Christ-followers who heal, transform, and bless our suffering world.