The Joy of the Lord: Nehemiah, Rich Mullins, and the Dawn Treader

By Hannah Hubin

And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law. Then he said to them, “Go your way. Eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions to anyone who has nothing ready, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” So the Levites calmed all the people, saying, “Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved.” And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.

—Nehemiah 8:9-12

I’ve been praying for joy for the last few years, because I want to be more joyful and less Lenten all the time. Lent is, after all, only forty days out of the year. And I want to ask for joy the way Christ asks his followers to make their desires known to the Father (Matthew 7:9-11). I’ve been asking for the joy of the Lord to be my strength, the way Nehemiah promised it was for the grieving people of God after Ezra read aloud the lost and forgotten Law of the Lord.

The trouble is that I don’t know what is meant by the joy of the Lord or what it means to make it our strength. I don’t know how to make that actionable—how to move forward into joy faithfully. Trying to “choose joy” throughout my day usually lands me with a fake mask of emotion and less joy by the evening than I had in the morning, simply because I’ve been committing some sort of emotional forgery. Emotional forgery is not something the Lord calls his people into.

But obedience is.

Over the last few years, I’ve returned again and again to this little interview clip from Rich Mullins. It’s about six minutes long, and if you have the time and are in a place where you can listen to something aloud, I think it’s well worth at least one pass, if not twelve. If you can’t listen now, I’ve transcribed a few parts here.

In my own life, I think that for years I tried to avoid loneliness because it hurts to feel lonely. Now I’m beginning to recognize that maybe that’s what it feels like when God calls me. Maybe, when God is calling, it hurts. Maybe when God calls us, it feels like a pain. And for years in my own life, I tried to drown that pain; I tried to avoid that pain; I tried to fill that ache with all kinds of what I can now look back on and see was a lot of stuff that was destroying me, corrupting me. And to listen to the call of God means to accept some of the emptiness that we have in our own lives. And rather than always trying to drown out that feeling of emptiness, instead of always trying to fill it with a lot of junk, to allow that to be a door through which we go to meet God.…And this is where I think moral purity begins to play in—that almost everything that corrupts us is something that we use to fill some kind of ache, some kind of emptiness. And moral purity might be nothing more than a call to accept the ache and to accept the emptiness and to allow ourselves to go through that to where God is calling us to go. And the joy of Christian life is that those aches, those needs, that emptiness that we’re going to encounter because we are human, are ultimately met in Christ and that everything that we try to fill it with that’s not Christ will never really fill it. So we’re constantly connected to some kind of a lifeline that keeps us tied down. When we finally cut that lifeline off…it’s a very scary thing. And we go, ‘Wow, will I ever stop hurting?’ And my answer is: don’t worry about hurting. Realize that this is how badly God wants you. And that that hurt that you’re feeling, that emptiness that you’re feeling—maybe that’s how it feels when you’re called by God. So don’t try to fill it. Don’t try to quiet it. But ask God to give you the courage to face that and to walk through that to him. Because when we connect with God, I don’t think that that means that the emptiness goes away and is always gone, but it frees us from those IV kinds of needles that keep us bound up in some kind of hospital where we can’t really live freely and wander wildly as we want.…It is for freedom that Christ has set you free. And it’s a wonderful thing…to be able to live in silence and to live in unpleasantness and to still have joy. And joy doesn’t come from substances. Joy doesn’t come from worldly wealth. Joy comes from God. We were created to love God, and only when we experience that love are we really free. Anything that would impede that love—anything that would block our own awareness for our need for that—that binds us up. And that’s why moral purity, I think, is an important thing. You want to set yourself free from those things that would impede you from freedom.

When the returned exiles listened to the law long enough to realize their own emptiness, God invited them to walk through that emptiness to him. There was joy, then, in Israel—not because the people of God had stopped up their emptiness like rags beneath a leaking door, but because they had finally turned to face it and could look through it like an open door to the Lord. Rich Mullins is right in step with Nehemiah in understanding that a discussion on loneliness and the pursuit of joy must begin with the love of the law and the practice of moral purity, not in an attempt to tangle ourselves in rules and regulations, but to be free from “those things that would impede you from freedom,” from joy, from the loneliness that leads us to the Lord.

So it is, I think, that the first step in joy is obedience. It makes all the sense in the world when we stop to think about it, because joy is part of the fruit of the Spirit and grows as we keep in step with the Spirit. It’s in obedience that joy becomes actionable. “Choose joy,” and we end up in a mess of emotional forgery. But “Choose Christ,” and all this will be added to us. Galatians 5, in which we find the fruit of the Spirit, begins with the call to freedom that Rich read: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” So obedience begets freedom, and freedom begets joy.

It’s counterintuitive to choose to open ourselves to more pain in our pursuit of joy—to pull away from the comforts that are tiding us over. It’s just the sort of paradox the Christian life would keep around—right up there with how the one who loses his life finds it. But the call to obedience is not a call to asceticism. Like Rich said, “Don’t worry about hurting.” It’s not the point, and it’s also not the main problem. If you can bear to keep the door open, the joy of the Lord will be your strength. And, because the joy of the Lord will be your strength, you can bear to keep the door open. You can bear to face the emptiness, leave it empty, and look through it to the face of your Lord.

I don’t have a lot of experience to speak from, but I do know sometimes some emptiness hurts less over time. Some paths on the road of moral purity become easier to walk the longer we’re on them, and some emptiness the Lord does fill in tangible and experiential ways this side of the veil. Other days, keeping the door open feels like choosing again and again to let in the wind and the rain and the dark. Loneliness is almost the worst place I know.

You know that part in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Caspian and company sail to the Island Where Dreams Come True? At first, it appears to be an island many of them have been looking for, where those empty places could be filled and the loneliness comforted. Then they realize—quickly—that their dreams are not as idyllic as daydreams and that the comfort they sought leaves only fear and dread. Being there, left to my own comforts—that is the worst place I know. And the sense that comes to the crew aboard the Treader is the same as ours: that we will never get out.

But perhaps you know already how the chapter ends.

Lucy leant her head on the edge of the fighting-top and whispered, "Aslan, Aslan, if ever you loved us at all, send us help now." The darkness did not grow any less, but she began to feel a little—a very, very little—better. "After all, nothing has really happened to us yet," she thought."Look!" cried Rynelf's voice hoarsely from the bows. There was a tiny speck of light ahead, and while they watched a broad beam of light fell from it upon the ship. It did not alter the surrounding darkness, but the whole ship was lit up as if by a searchlight. Caspian blinked, stared round, saw the faces of his companions all with wild, fixed expressions. Everyone was staring in the same direction: behind everyone lay his black, sharply-edged shadow.Lucy looked along the beam and presently saw something in it. At first it looked like a cross, then it looked like an aeroplane, then it looked like a kite, and at last with a whirring of wings it was right overhead and was an albatross. It circled three times round the mast and then perched for an instant on the crest of the gilded dragon at the prow. It called out in a strong sweet voice what seemed to be words though no one understood them. After that it spread its wings, rose, and began to fly slowly ahead, bearing a little to starboard. Drinian steered after it not doubting that it offered good guidance. But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, "Courage, dear heart," and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan's, and with the voice a delicious smell breathed in her face.In a few moments the darkness turned into a greyness ahead, and then, almost before they dared to begin hoping, they had shot out into the sunlight and were in the warm, blue world again.

Though it may take all our lives, we’re sailing through, and we’re sailing out. And like a beam of light, an albatross, and the whisper of “courage, dear heart,” the joy of the Lord is our strength.

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Hannah Hubin is a writer, poet, and lyricist. Her projects include All the Wrecked Light: A Lyrical Exposition of Psalm 90 (www.allthewreckedlight.com) and the online visual poetry project Brown Brink Eastward. Hubin teaches humanities, writing, and Latin just south of Nashville and is currently pursuing graduate studies in Biblical languages.

Photo by Thanos Pal on Unsplash