I’ve come to the conclusion, in my ripe old age of thirty-two, that life is just hard. Even an easy life is hard. Even a life where you married the man of your dreams, and you have two beautiful and hilarious kids and a nice, comfortable house and a great big yard and you live in a free country with more food in the pantry that you could eat in a week. Even with all that, life can be pretty excruciating on the heart. It just is. We all have our own reasons why.

And deep down inside, in the middle of all the hard, we’re all just looking for joy. We crave it. We just feel like there’s gotta be something more than getting up and going to work and coming home and eating some food and watching a show and going to bed and getting up and doing it all over again. There’s gotta be something more than living for the weekend or the next vacation. And we wonder, where in the world in all the mundane, does a sore heart find joy?

Now, I don’t claim to be full of wisdom and experience in this life, but I have found something that helps. Or shall I say, I have found Someone who helps. And I’ve noticed that we’ve got to have eyes to see, if we’re really gonna have joy in this life. And we have to do some looking, some hunting, some paying attention, some tuning in.

Because the pressures of this life push on us. The hurt of the here and now, it weighs us down. And we can get crazy busy and so focused on the next thing that we whiz right by the joy that God would have for us in the moment.

In all our living and doing and being, we run right past the God who can be seen and felt in our everyday lives. The God who would give us joy. The Maker who daily shouts it out, “I am real. Here I am! I’m what you’ve been aching for. Now, come to Me.”

So, in order to have eyes to see, we’ve got to ask ourselves this. All throughout the day, at every turn, we have to keep seeking it out. How can I see God here? How is He blessing me now? How is He making Himself known?”

Because this, this is the remedy for the sick and the sore. This is the medicine we drink for all the angst. This is how we come alive to a God who lives. That when we slow down long enough to look for Joy Himself, we find Him here and He does satisfy. His Presence heals our hearts. Joy fills.

And we were made for this. So, nothing else will do. And since the cross of Christ is the beam we walk on to get back to God, then we cross right over so we can live this unbroken fellowship with Him.

God only knows how we can get so lost in a day. We choke ourselves on expectations. We can downright drown in the to-do list. But, being aware of Him–His beauty, His glory is the way our hearts find rest. Until the day we wake up forever with Him, this is the way, for now, we find our way back Home.

The leaves turn and we can, too. Always turning our eyes to Him. The seasons change and our lives can change, too. We can be the dead walking or we can be the living with joy bursting out. But, we’ve got to be still enough and we’ve got to have eyes to see. To really see through to the glorious Maker of all this.