{"id":770,"date":"2017-10-10T10:00:40","date_gmt":"2017-10-10T16:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carolscorner.ca\/blog\/?p=770"},"modified":"2017-10-06T15:40:05","modified_gmt":"2017-10-06T21:40:05","slug":"puzzle-piece-of-joy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/2017\/10\/puzzle-piece-of-joy\/","title":{"rendered":"Puzzle Piece of Joy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"joy1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Joy and happiness – are they really the same? I love to search out meanings of words. The dictionary defines happiness as the state of being happy so I looked up happy which is defined as<\/p>\n

showing pleasure or contentment<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Synonyms for happy include words like cheery and jovial.
\nJoy is defined as:<\/p>\n

a feeling of great pleasure and happiness<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Synonyms include delight, jubilation, triumph
\nYet there is also the context that joy is a good feeling in the soul and I checked a Biblical definition of joy. <\/p>\n

Joy is an emotion that is acquired by the anticipation or expectation of something great and wonderful<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I read in James 1:2 that we should have joy in all our trials I find that joy and happiness are no longer the same. When my youngest daughter was born and lay in a coma, fighting for her life with a five percent chance to live I was not delighted or jubilant. I had no great pleasure in the situation nor was I happy and contented. I prayed, I cried and I found the shadows of this puzzle piece in my life to be deep, dark and frightening. I questioned why this was happening even while I believed that God could heal my baby. <\/p>\n

Yet while I cried and felt deep pain and sorrow, I also felt a joy – an anticipation of the amazing things God could and would do. This joy had no basis in what was happening around me. Circumstances did not dictate whether I felt joy. To me this helped me, after my baby survived, the meaning of having joy in the midst of trials. When I gave the horrible circumstance, the uncertainty of life to God, he gave me a peace that was beyond anything I had ever felt and with that came a joy – an anticipation of something beyond human expectations or abilities. <\/p>\n

\"broken<\/a><\/p>\n

Joy that only God could supply helped heal my broken heart during this tough time in my life. Tears still flowed. I still felt an impatience for life to be more like what I had expected. I still hated to see my little one struggle to do things that most of us take for granted. She is now thirty-five years old. Everything she can do is medially impossible. God granted a miracle but it did not look anything like I expected. There have been health concerns, seizures, learning disabilities and a longing for acceptance and friends that has not always come. I am unhappy about these times but the outward circumstances do not dictate the joy inside only the outward happiness which is dependent on situations. <\/p>\n

Have you found the puzzle piece of joy in your life? How does God help you through the unhappy times in life? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joy and happiness – are they really the same? I love to search out meanings of words. The dictionary defines happiness as the state of being happy so I looked up happy which is defined as showing pleasure or contentment Synonyms for happy include words like cheery and jovial. Joy is defined as: a feeling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puzzle-pieces-of-life","category-storytelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":774,"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions\/774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.carolscorner.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}