Joy
For years, I've celebrated something I call small joys as a way to celebrate the tiny moments of joy that can be found in the midst of the ordinary. I started this practice in 2012 upon graduating from college, when a mentor and preceptor at my first job as a nurse described a pair of comfortable scrubs as a small joy. Ever since that time, I have sought out these moments of small joy in the midst of every day life. I even started a book on this topic, but it has sat unfinished for quite some time.
New years always bring new opportunities-- they seem a blank page on which we are to write. Some view the new year as an opportunity to change for the better; others take a view that this is a silly waste of time, that nothing can really change because of an arbitrary blank page. I tend to fall into the group that views a new year as a clean slate, a chance to be something different. In the past few years, however, I have gotten away from writing out resolutions and have instead started choosing a word for the year.
My words from years past (this is likely not a complete list, just what I can think of off the top of my head) include run, endure, in, nourish, and truth. I always pick a Bible verse to be my theme verse for the year and write out my intentions for the word. Sometimes it is hard to me to choose a word, and I will go back and forth between two words for a while until I prayerfully settle on one.
For 2021, my word came to me without much of a second thought. There was no debating, no deliberating over whether this was the right word. I kept hearing it and seeing it all around me, and I kept hearing the Holy Spirit whisper it when I prayed over what 2021's intent should be. At long last, after years of seeking joy and celebrating small moments of joy, I am choosing joy as my 2021 word.
Joy feels like the friend that's been walking beside me all along who I sometimes forget to call or send a birthday card to; it feels like the thing I am always wanting and that I sometimes find. We have had a major upheaval of our lives this year, as have many. In 2020, my husband left his job as a dentist in Indiana and moved to North Carolina; we finished (95% at least-- as I write, there are still some walls I need to paint) renovating a home we purchased in Columbus three years ago and have plans to sell it early this year. We have mostly moved out of our 3900 square foot home and are living in a 700 square foot apartment, and we have been taking constant inventory of things, evaluating what should stay and what should go. Do we really need four spatulas, three crockpots, and clothes we haven't worn in two years? We are in the thick of our relocation process, and at times I have described our life as a circus through all of this.
With all of that, I have left my job as well. The intention was for me to transition to NC with my company as we were initially thinking we were going to be living near one of their locations. As things continue to unfold and our plans started to crumble, we realized that we would not be near a clinic that I could work at with my company. We also did some reflection and just realized that healthcare has been a heavy burden for me thus far in my career, requiring long hours and much of my personal life to be scarified for the benefit of those I care for. I am using my relocation time as a time of a sabbatical from working; I will take some time in the early months of this year to work on my NC nursing license, get my driver's license, and do the "settling down" kind of things that need to be done in a relocation process.
And in the midst of it all, there is joy.
I will share more about what joy means to be in the coming months as I settle back into writing again. One hope and intent that I have for 2020 is picking up writing my book again. I've long said that my book may just be something I write for the sense of accomplishment and to put my words on paper-- it may be something that just sits on the bookshelves and coffee tables of people I love. But it feels important that I do it, after almost a decade of dreaming about it, planning it, writing small chapters of it.
So let's look to the new year with an abundance of joy.
Love,
C
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