Joy, by The Balloonatic

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Joy, by The Balloonatic

Dave Freer wrote a book called “Joy Cometh with the Mourning,” a cozy little murder mystery sold to raise funds for the Anglican church on Flinder’s Island, a small island between Tasmania and the main coast of Australia. The main character is a female minister named Joy who stumbles into solving a murder, with the title being a word play on a Bible verse. By the end of the book, Joy doesn’t only find whodunnit, she also finds herself and her place in life. When I think of Joy, this book is one of the things which pops into my head.

I think most of us, in this political climate where it feels like we are at war, sometimes lose sight of Joy. We get bogged down in the fighting between left and right, in the battle for our children, our lives and our country. In the fight to be left alone to live in peace and let others do the same. We see our childhood heroes and icons torn down – whether it’s our favorite comic book superhero who has now become a symbol of woke, or our favorite toy that is also pandering to the social spectrum that is being pushed on us.

As one of many who suffers from depression, joy felt like something that was just beyond my grasp, lurking somewhere that I just couldn’t reach, fleeing before I could get to it. I got bogged down by the struggle to survive and make ends meet, by a job I hated and an unhappy marriage. Instead of joy, I, as many, found anger and bitterness. The world became a dark place, where people are being pitted against each other – left vs right, black vs white, people of faith vs those of different faiths or no faith, the rich vs the poor, the straight vs the alphabet gang, parents vs those who want to be the ones to raise our children in social awareness, equity and “justice.”

And yet, I think it’s important, when it feels like we are walled in by enemies, strife and hardship to not just fight back, but to search for joy, even if it’s in small moments. To watch the awe and wonder as your nieces and nephews see fireflies for the first time. To pick up your son from his first time playing airsoft as he fills the car with the excited chatter of his day and the fun he had. To go to bed at night and be pounced on by a bundle of fur who says that it’s time for play and pets, and to have her snuggle next to you. To hear the good news of someone surviving against the odds when you thought they were lost. To find your favorite hen perched on top of the woodpile when you were searching the yard for her, sure that she had been snatched by something. To create something that you know will bring joy to someone else.

These are the things that our enemies are trying to take away from us. They are trying to pound us down into despair, where we feel helpless and alone. So yes, we need to prepare, to be willing to fight back, but in our mourning of the past and gazing ahead to the hurdles facing us in the future, we shouldn’t neglect to find joy and treasure those special moments in our hearts and use them to strengthen ourselves for the tough times ahead. As the saying goes, “Stop and smell the flowers,” but also plant flower seeds to bring joy to those around you.

56 thoughts on “Joy, by The Balloonatic”

  1. I so needed to read this article today. And to treat myself – just bought a paperback copy of Dave’s book. Can’t wait to read it.

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  3. Jennifer, you will absolutely love the book. I have reread it many times. And yes, we need to focus on moments of joy especially during times of stress.

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  4. Stop and smell the flowers, it’s the best place to hide the claymore’s….sarc.

    There is much Joy in the world, the Joy you get when you help a neighbor or a friend. When are you decent to others they tend to be decent to you. Then you have an Island of sanity in this crazy world. Soon there are even more Islands of sanity and less crazy. One Island of sanity at a time and we get back to the way it is supposed to be.

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    2. I’ve been finding that is what is happening in my little corner of the world. There is still grumbling and moments of shaking my head or feeling like I want to bang it against the wall, especially when dealing with a teenager and just plain ignorant coworkers, but there are more and more moments of joy.

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  5. The joy of discovering that the kid just a few houses down from our new house has been taking care of the lawn since the previous owners left and will continue to do so since we asked. Plus he’s a cat sitter! The joy of little kids smiling at you in the store when you make a face or just wave.

    Yes, I try to remember those moments and create more of them. It’s necessary.

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  6. Joy would be Biden’s pilot crashing Air Force One in the Pacific. Won’t happen, but I can dream of the smile on the satisfied sharks face. Because we all know sharks will eat anything, and this is no threat Biden will drown, we all know feces floats.

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        1. They might not succeed. The cabinet can initiate 25th Amendment action against the president but at the end of the day it takes 2/3 of both houses of Congress to remove the president if he contests it.The Reader can see the Republicans leaving Kamala in place.

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  7. I am very excited for my just turned 5 year old granddaughter. Her state had changed the date for kindergarten eligibility and she missed the cut off by ONE day. She would be eligible to be grandfathered in IF her parents could get her enrolled in a Charter school which don’t necessarily have the same rules. They had her on several waiting lists but it didn’t look like it was going to happen for her, until today. They got a call from their first choice school and she starts Wednesday and gets to meet her teacher tomorrow.

    She is over the moon excited about going to school. I really hope and pray it goes well for her. But her joy at going to “big girl school” is so sweet. I remember how excited I was.

    Ah those were the days ☺️

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      2. She has her issues, but actually did her best to live up to her name. Ward of the State when I met her (due to abuse, likely sexual, she never talked about it directly, but occasionally we’d trip a trigger) and lived in a home for girls run by a Baptist org. The “house mothers” liked me because if I took her and any other girls out, they all got back home on time, sober, and still happy from the fun they had. Her having her daughter helped her a lot mentally, from what I could tell.

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  9. This is my wheelhouse. I have attempted to practice JOY for over 30 years. I tell people there are 2 secrets of life: Joy and gratitude. Joy looks like happiness. It is more. It is one of the 4 infinities. Love, Hope, Peace and JOY. We will encounter infinite Joy when we meet the author.

    The dictionary is wrong. It says Joy is mere happiness. This short explanation shows why that is false. I cannot be happy my son has died of cancer. But I can be Joyful, because Joy, like Love, is not affected by circumstances. So suffering refines away mere happiness, leaving nothing but pure Joy. Joy is a gift. It is not the result of anything we try. It is simply an awareness of infinity.

    Dean Koontz in his book “One Door Away from Heaven”, on pages288-290 ( in the hardback) has a character encounter the “playful presence” in the dreams of an innocent dog:
    “Curtis more clearly experiences the dog’s profound joy. This isn’t simply the joy of running, of springing agilely from log to mossy rock; this isn’t just the joy of freedom or of being fully ALIVE, but the piercing joy that comes with the awareness of the holy, playful Presence.”

    If you have not read this book, find it. Read it. Reread pages 288 to 290. Be aware Joy is offered you as a gift, a gift most often found when we practice gratitude.

    When people ask me how I am, I say Joyful. It is amazing the responses I have gotten. It seems, like the fish, a way of finding those who know the Joy that comes of knowing the “Playful Presence”. I have an old Jack in the Box, Joy Christmas antenna ball, so I tell people. Joy follows me wherever I go.

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  10. At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can’t stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can’t. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it

    Orwell

    https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/some-thoughts-on-the-common-toad/

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        1. Heh. I’ll have you know I got started as a maintenance analyst in the military. With roughly 21% oxygen in the air, everything corrodes over time, some faster than others. Now oxygen still gets inside a nuclear bomb, maybe not a lot, but enough that over time, you get corrosion that can disrupt circuits or make mechanism not function properly. (Heck even a car stored in a pure nitrogen atmosphere degrades over time.) And while I can’t say I have personal experience in working with fissile materials, supposedly even a layer of corrosion on the fissile components may be enough to poison the reaction.

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          1. It fills me with joy to know that all the Super Duper Soviet-Era bombs and missiles filled with nuclear whatnot are in the same basic shape as a barn-find ’72 Camaro. The batteries are a pile of salts, the wiring is corroded to sh1t, the manuals are yellowed museum relics, the software is on tapes that haven’t been looked at in 30 years and all the people who wrote it are retired and/or dead.

            Yeah. I really like that.

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            1. Well, there are several different types of nuke warheads in the inventory. At least one of them uses tritium gas for a fusion stage, and that has a short half-life requiring periodic replacement. i.e. maintenance.

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  12. Enjoy life! Doing so drives the bastards crazy.

    Or, as they taught us in SERE School, savor the small victories.

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  13. I wrote this a few months ago. Since then I had the opportunity to spend a bit of time at my Dad’s camp. There is nothing like waking up at dawn and taking the dog out for a hike along the beach to the point and back, finding the perfect walking stick in the rocks on the shore, watching the sun rise, seeing a loon floating among the waves and having a flock of cranes fly overhead. It makes up for having to literally wade through nastiness as I deal with a backed up sewer flooding my basement. I can stand in the nastiness but it won’t overpower the joy.

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  14. Aye, there was a time in the last few years where trying to say something (“I don’t care for $X, I can’t explain why, I just don’t. It actually creeps me out some.”) was met with armchairbettoir psycholgizingk COMRADE! And so much G[eneral] D[ynamics] struggle session. The claims of ‘trying to help/understand’ fell so very FLAT. More like attempts at inducing suicide.

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    1. This is Sarah and Larry’s great contribution to the writing world and the larger world around us. Thanks to the Sad Puppy campaigns, now we -know- they’re lying.

      They haven’t stopped lying of course, but now we know. >:D It makes all the difference.

      Hail lobster!

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  16. “…but also plant flower seeds to bring joy to those around you.”

    Sometimes I amaze myself at what a big difference a small, thoughtful, constructive act can make. Which reminds me, I got a scholarship recommendation that needs to get into the mail, RIGHT NOW!

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    1. My Dad is the inspiration for that. He scatters flower seeds at the end of his property at his camp, so there are rows of flowers at the end of the road. When they’re blooming, he puts a sign next to them with a pair of scissors: “Free flowers, pick your own” or someting along those lines.

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  17. I’ve been actually planting flowers. I work for an elderly lady cleaning and caring for her yard and garden, and one morning as I was weeding a jolly soul walked by, stopped, and exclaimed with delight over the Technicolor display of tulips. He wasn’t the only one who’s stopped and smiled, only the most effusive. I’m convinced that planting beautiful gardens has worth in the world. God loves gardens, and so do His children!
    Planting a garden doesn’t mean the world isn’t hard or life difficult, it just means you refuse to give up on joy and beauty despite the hardness and difficulty.

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    1. I’m basically the only one in the neighborhood with actual flower gardens. Tough place to garden what with deer and a very tough, short, growing season, but I love to do it. My kids all live far away so I have time.

      Every single time I am outside someone walking by says how much they enjoy looking at it. It makes me happy that I can make others happy.

      Also, I can give away my zucchini to them.
      I wonder why no one stops more than once? JK

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      1. That reminds me, I need to start putting things in my office box at Day Job to discourage the produce fairy …

        I don’t mind some squash, but people assume that single = starving = bless with lots and lots of veggies. Since MomRed is also presented with tomatoes, squash, et cetera, RedQuarters overfloweth. Even this year, when the heat is beating up on tomatoes.

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          1. I have 15 zucchini/summer squash/pattypan/tromboncino squashes this year. Yea verily, my table overflows with produce. What I’m really looking forward to are the melons – none of my peach blossoms survived the unexpected late frost, so I must make do.

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        2. Small town regular to obvious tourists: “Be sure to lock your car!”
          Tourists: “What? Small towns are safe!”
          Regular: “Not during zucchini season.”

          Has there ever been a bad zucchini, where bad is lack of zucchini produced?

          ;-)

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  18. I’m attempting to do my part with my stories. It’s a poor story that leaves the world a sadder place.

    Covers are coming along. Publishing activity will come “soon”. (Aslan says all times are soon.)

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      1. Arrrgh! I could have happily forgotten reading that. The House of Seven Gables was more cheerful. Heck, The Fall of the House of Usher was more fun!

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      2. I had to look that one up. That’s what I’m talking about.

        Surely there must be a better way to proceed than deliberately setting out to immiserate your readers.

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      3. I hate everything about that book.

        I’m actually not unhappy about The House of Mirth by the same author, because although the protagonist dies at the end, she’s worked herself out of the hole and there’s a good deal of evidence that her death was accidental rather than deliberate. Much better message.

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  20. I have been reading up (mostly one book, by Courtney J.P. Friesen, which collects and expands several articles of his) on how classical drama influenced early Christians and was used in apologetics. It is freaking fascinating.

    See, a lot of stuff that was critical of the gods, the myths, and possibly of the existence of the divine (it is cagey stuff, and a lot is pushing for something higher and different instead) was used by the Christians to explain that actual God was better. And that is part of why Christians were wrongly called atheists.

    So yeah, this is part of why we have edgy stuff from Lucian and Euripides.

    Also, theoi is Greek for gods… But did you know that the Greek for atheists is “atheoi”?

    There were also militant agnostic skeptic philosophers who believed that nothing could be known for certain, all arguments should be set out to show that both sides had equally strong points, and all judgement should be held in suspension. This would give you the supposed virtue of ataraxia, being unmoved.

    Well, I guess we could have skipped the Nineties if we’d had these guys in the history of philosophy Cliff Notes….

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