The Joy Test
the joy no joy experiment
The sun is starting to come back here in Nashville — and with it, I can feel my joy returning too.
I wish I weren’t so affected by the weather. I really do. I tried to reframe January as a “Rest Period”( see my first substack post) but it’s almost March now, and I am over it. It’s nearly 4:00 PM and I am READY to get going!
Last week the sun was shining, the sky was robin’s egg blue, and I felt pure JOY.
Which got me thinking about a little test that surfaced in my life about ten years ago — the Joy or No Joy test.
It came from Marie Kondo’s wildly popular book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Marie’s simple, genius idea: when you’re cleaning out your closet, your house, anything — pick up each item and ask yourself, Does this spark joy? If it does, it stays. No joy? It goes.
I have three grown daughters. Can you imagine how many closets, dorm rooms, and overstuffed drawers I have helped clean out over the years? My girls approached that task with about as much enthusiasm as a dentist appointment — until Joy or No Joy entered the picture. Suddenly, this was fun. For the first time, I had a framework to put around what I’d been asking them (and myself) all along. You knew when something sparked joy. And you knew — equally clearly — when it didn’t deserve another inch of closet space.
Standing in that sunshine last week, I started applying the test to life more broadly.
Sunshine — JOY. Dark, gray winter days — no joy.
A dear friend who fills the room — JOY. The person you spot across a crowded party and immediately start plotting your exit — no joy.
A trip on the horizon — JOY. A hard conversation you’ve been putting off — no joy.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
The no-joy things in life — the difficult family situation, the friend walking through an unwanted divorce, the relationship that takes everything you’ve got — those don’t get thrown out. You don’t declutter people. You don’t declutter hard seasons.
We recognize them for what they are. We sit with the weight of them. And we show up anyway.
The Bible doesn’t sugarcoat this. It tells us plainly that hard things are coming. But it goes even further than that — it asks us to count them as joy.
James 1:2-4 says:
“Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. And let perseverance have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
So what do we do with that?
Are you telling me winter makes me better?
I think it does. I think even the literal seasons — with their darkness and their dormancy and their slow, stubborn return to light — reflect something God built into the design on purpose. We need the dark to appreciate the light. We need the trial to appreciate the peace. We need the hard to appreciate the soft.
God is so good that He allows the hard. He allows the long winters. He allows the no-joy seasons — because He knows we are not home yet. This life, with all its beauty and all its grief, is the refining. And most of us will taste real joy here on this earth — deep, surprising, robin’s-egg-blue joy.
But the truest joy? The joy we were actually made for? That’s waiting for us at home with Him.
And honestly, we have no idea what’s coming.
That sparks joy.