Joyspan

This week I turned to an old friend for some solace. I read the writings of and listened to videos of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He witnessed and lived through horror and tragedy, and yet he brimmed with joy.

“Joyspan” is a word introduced to me by Dr. Susan Golden, our Faith Forum guest on October 8. She suggests we use joyspan as an alternative to lifespan. We may desire to live a long time, but joyspan focuses on the quality of our years, the presence and depth of joy throughout the length of our life.

We all know people whose lifespans were short but whose joyspans were rich, vibrant, and swept us up under their canopies, too.

Sometimes trauma, grief, or aging convince us that our joyspan has ended even if our lifespan has not. We are grateful for the joys that have been ours and may believe pockets of relief and pleasing distraction will still come, but we do not expect to experience true, heart-bursting joy again. Yet poet Mary Oliver wrote that joy is not meant to be a crumb. Author Rob Bell writes, “efficiency and production are not God’s highest goals for your life. Joy is.” 

I recently visited in the home of a couple who have been married seventy years. He used to hitchhike from New Jersey to North Carolina nearly every weekend to see her until he switched schools to be near her. For the 18 months they were apart, they wrote hundreds of letters. For one anniversary, he bound those letters in four binders, each binder as thick as New York City phonebooks used to be. In the months before their 70th anniversary, she read aloud through the letters, a few each night at dinner together. As they relayed this story to me, she put her hand on her husband’s arm and said, “That was really fun, wasn’t it, babe?” Babe. They are both near ninety. My heart burst a little as their joyspan stretched across to include me as well.

Bishop Tutu reminded me this week, “Discovering more joy does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreaks without being broken.”

Peace,

Lisa