What if joy in suffering isn’t a contradiction—but an invitation? This reflective piece by Alyssa Joy Bethke explores how joy and sorrow often walk together, forming us through gratitude, wonder, and the steady presence of Jesus in every season.

Learn how to see sorrow and joy as companions on the road to transformation.

Joy and sorrow can go hand in hand. Together. Not separate. It’s a truth that should bolster our faith and help us fight against the fear of pain. Pain will come, but we can rest assured that with the pain, there will be joy. Not right away. But eventually. It’s only through pain that we can experience the deep joy we are longing for. And we can know that as we cry today, He is the God who will wipe our tears and hold us close. Joy will come, but even as we wait for the morning, joy is still with us through the night.

“Joy is not the absence of pain, but the presence of God,” said Elisabeth Elliot, the woman who knew pain so deeply with the loss of two husbands and yet lived with utter joy.

Joy is the presence of God as we sit with Him, learn from Him, walk with Him, and partner with Him. It’s having His presence invade every part of our lives, every part of our hearts. And then living differently. Living in His presence.

This is good news! Our joy will not fade with our age, with our life stages, with our seasons, with our circumstances, with our relationships. Because joy is, in fact, a person. Jesus. And it’s Jesus with us that fills us with unshakable joy.

But joy can only be experienced, can only be fully accepted when we sit and spend time with Jesus. When we contemplate His character and His faithfulness and His promises. We must sit and see Jesus in the most beautiful sunshiny days and in the darkest hour of our lives. He is with us in the sorrow and in the good, and both, somehow, are turned into gifts because He uses it all for our transformation, as we behold Him. And then as we behold Him, we go out and make Him known.

A conversation with our missionary friend Jon helped me grasp this. Jon was telling us stories of ministry and his life, and I finally gathered the courage I needed to ask him the question that had been burning in my head for months.

“Jon, how do you keep going? In life, in ministry, after so much hard, and yet you’re so full of joy. You are always smiling and have this glimmer in your eye.”

He smiled and looked at me with that same twinkle in his eye and said in his thick Australian accent, “Alyssa, it’s because I have the bubble of wonduh” (wonder, but you know, in his Australian accent, it comes off as “wonduh”!).

Bubble of wonder? What was that?

He went on: “How could I not be full of joy? Look at what I get to do on a daily basis. My life is lived on mission; I’m in a war zone, and I get to tell people about Jesus. Every day I see pain and crisis, and I also get to see God at work here. And I get to be a part of it. I am so incredibly grateful for my life. For what God has given me. He is so good.”

I began to wonder what would happen if we lived with a bubble of wonder. If we took time to sit and think about God’s goodness daily. To deeply soak in His goodness. To us, in His Word, in our communities, in nature.

Joy can only be woven into us through gratitude. Gratitude is what keeps our hearts soft in a world that wants to break us. In a world where sin lives and in bodies where our flesh can war against our spirit, gratitude takes our eyes off of our circumstances and puts them on the One who is higher than them all. It allows us to notice all the ways He works and is present with us, in the big and the small, the momentous and the ordinary.

We have a choice to choose joy every day, in every moment. Will we choose to think about all that isn’t? Will we choose to complain? Will we choose to sit in our woes?

Or will we choose to be thankful? To see with His eyes, to be full of gratitude, even in the hard?

Will we choose to sit with Jesus?

…

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