I have spent three days asking you hard questions.
If you are anything like me, your journal has tears on at least one page by now.
So today we are doing something different.
Today we are going to remember that God invented laughter long before He invented hiking boots.
What eighteen months taught me
Here is the thing I learned, and it took a while.
Grief and joy can live in the same room.
I spent the last eighteen months functioning. Thriving, honestly, in several areas of my life. Writing a book. Building something. Moving to a new city.
And underneath all of it there was a grief I could not quite put down.
Part of that grief was strange, and I did not have a name for it for a long time. It was the grief of being happy when I thought I was supposed to be falling apart.
Something in me had decided that if I was hurting, I was not allowed to enjoy anything until the hurting was finished.
So there was guilt attached to the good days. Guilt for celebrating. Guilt for laughing on a Tuesday when something in my life was still broken and unresolved and probably always would be.
I celebrated the achievements anyway. I want to say that plainly, because I think somebody needs to hear it.
I celebrated them, and it was allowed.
There were also days I cried. Days I woke up genuinely happy. Days I woke up frustrated for no reason I could name.
You do not have to wait for the grief to finish before you are allowed to enjoy anything.
That is what I think the joy actually is.
Not a mood that stays. Not a season where nothing hurts.
It is being able to experience every emotion in a single day, acknowledge each one honestly, and not hand any one of them the power to decide how you show up for the rest of it.
You can cry at nine in the morning and mean it, and laugh at four in the afternoon and mean that too. Neither one cancels the other. Neither one is the lie.
What I am actually looking forward to
Some of my joy came back when I moved to Orlando. New restaurants. New people. A fresh start, and the simple pleasure of trying things I had never tried.
And now, fourteen days out, I have a list.
I am looking forward to the passport stamps. To meeting people I would never have met. To eating their food and drinking their wine. To the churches, and honestly to the detail on the buildings, the carving around a doorway that somebody spent a year on eight hundred years ago and nobody signed.
I am looking forward to laughing when it rains and it was not in the forecast.
I know this trip is going to be an emotional one. Three letters in and you already know more about my grief than most people in my life do.
It is also going to be full of laughter.
Hope, faith, trust, and laughter. All four are good for the soul, and I do not think you have to pick.
The girl who laughed without checking the room first.Silent to Spoken: A Woman's Journey Through the Pause
That line is from my book. It is about who you were before somebody taught you to read the room before you reacted.
She is still in there. She is usually just waiting for permission.
Consider this yours.
Camino History
There is a persistent idea that pilgrimage was grim. Hooded figures, silence, suffering measured out in miles.
The historical record does not really support that.
The best evidence we have of what medieval pilgrims were actually like is Chaucer, who wrote an entire book about a group of them traveling to Canterbury. They tell stories. They compete. They insult each other. Somebody gets drunk. It is loud, and funny, and often not remotely holy.
That was pilgrimage. People walking a long way together and being people the entire time.
On the Camino today, the joy is smaller and it is everywhere.
There is the credencial, the pilgrim passport, which you get stamped along the way. Churches, albergues, cafes, and post offices all have their own sello, and grown adults become genuinely competitive about collecting them. You will meet a sixty year old man who walked an extra kilometer for a stamp he liked the look of.
There is the moment a village comes into view when you did not think you could go further.
There is coffee. Café con leche becomes a ritual within about three days, and pilgrims will tell you about specific cups of it years later.
And there are the friendships. You fall into rhythm with strangers, and within a week they know things about you that your neighbors of ten years do not.
The Botafumeiro is the giant censer that swings across the cathedral in Santiago at the end of certain Masses.
It takes eight men, called tiraboleiros, to work it. Silver-plated brass, about a hundred and thirty pounds empty, and once they get it going it reaches roughly forty two miles an hour and rises almost to the ceiling. It appears in the Codex Calixtinus in the twelfth century, so pilgrims have been watching this for eight hundred years.
In 1499, during a visit from Princess Catherine of Aragon, the rope snapped.
The Botafumeiro flew out of the cathedral through the Platerías door.
Nobody was hurt. And there is something about that story I love, because it means that at the holiest moment of the entire pilgrimage, in front of royalty, the thing went flying out the door and everyone lived.
Somewhere along the way many of us decided that if God is doing something in us, we ought to look serious about it.
I do not think that is Jesus.
His first recorded miracle was making more wine at a party that had run out. He was accused of enjoying himself in the wrong company so often that it became one of the standard complaints against him.
Joy is not the reward at the end of the hard work. It shows up in the middle of it, uninvited, at inconvenient times.
Scripture Study
Nehemiah 8:9 through 12
The people have gathered and heard the Law read aloud for the first time in generations, and they are weeping. Nehemiah, Ezra, and the Levites tell them that this day is holy, and that they should not mourn or weep. They are told to go and eat rich food, drink something sweet, and send portions to those who have nothing prepared, because the joy of the Lord is their strength. So the people go away to eat and drink and celebrate with great joy, because they understood what had been said to them.
Look at what is actually happening here, because it is not what people usually assume.
These are exiles who have come home. The Law is read aloud, and as they listen they realize how far they had drifted and how much had been lost. They are not crying from happiness. They are devastated.
And they are told to stop.
Not because the grief is invalid. Because the day is holy and grief is not the only thing that belongs on it.
Then comes the instruction, and it is deeply unspiritual in the best way. Go eat something rich. Drink something sweet. Send some to whoever does not have any.
Joy, commanded on a day of weeping. With a meal attached. And an instruction to make sure nobody celebrates alone.
Dig Deeper
The line everyone knows from this passage is that the joy of the Lord is your strength.
The Hebrew word behind strength is ma'oz. It does not mean muscle or willpower. It means a stronghold. A fortress. A place you go when you are under attack.
So the sentence is not telling you that being cheerful will help you push through. It is saying joy is a shelter. Something you get inside of, not something you generate.
That changes the instruction entirely. Nehemiah is not telling grieving people to feel better. He is telling them where to take cover.
There is a second passage worth reading beside it. Paul writes rejoice always, and it gets quoted constantly by people having a fine day.
He wrote it from prison.
A few verses later he says he has learned to be content in any circumstance, and the word learned matters. It was not his temperament. It was a practice he built while chained to a guard.
Neither of these passages was written by someone whose life was going well. That is exactly why they are worth listening to.
Reflection Questions
Write honestly or do not write at all. Nobody is reading this but you.
- When was the last time I laughed without checking the room first?
- What have I been waiting to finish grieving before I let myself enjoy anything?
- Where have I felt guilty for being happy?
- What did joy feel like in my body, back when I felt it easily?
- What am I actually looking forward to? Not what I should be. What I am.
Prayer
Father,
I have been treating joy like something I have to earn, and I have never quite earned it.
Thank You for the days I laughed even when nothing was resolved. Those counted. I am sorry I felt guilty about them.
Be my stronghold. Not my mood. My shelter.
Teach me to hold grief and gladness in the same hand without dropping either one.
In Jesus' name, Amen.
Camino Challenge
Think back to when you were happiest.
Now find the specific thing. Not the year, not the season. The thing your five senses remember.
Singing in the shower. A song you used to play in the car with the windows down. A food you have not eaten in years. The smell of something. A place you used to go.
Write it down.
Then go do it this week.
Play the song. Cook the food. Sing in the shower badly and on purpose.
Remembering joy is nostalgia and it costs you nothing. Doing it is proof that it is still available to you, and that is a very different thing to learn about yourself.
And because I want to end this one lighter than the last three, what are you most excited about?
- Spanish pastries
- The cathedral
- Finally wearing those cute hiking outfits you have spent six months obsessing over
- Yes
Tomorrow We'll Walk…
You will see it everywhere out there. On packs, on posts, set into pavement, carved above doorways.
The scallop shell has marked pilgrims for a thousand years, and almost nobody can tell you why.
There are legends. There is also a much simpler explanation, and it has to do with the fact that a shell holds exactly one drink of water and no more.
Tomorrow we are going to talk about what you have been hoping this road will fill, and why the shell was never meant to be enough.
When were you happiest, and what did it feel like? Write me back below. I read every one.
Don't quit in the quiet.
Sharing love,
~ Jenn