Ten years ago I was standing in a field next to the 100-year-old farmhouse we’d moved into eight days earlier, chatting with my eighth-grade daughter. Out of nowhere our gigantic, lovable, profoundly stupid Great Dane plowed into me at full speed, launching me into the air backwards. Since I hadn’t learned how to defy gravity, the full weight of my body came down onto my neck. Hard. I lost all feeling from my chin to my waist for several very long minutes, and when feeling returned, I was in the most excruciating pain imaginable from a spinal cord injury.
A short while later my head and neck were immobilized as I was strapped to a board and placed in an ambulance. It was August in the south, and a few dozen mosquitos hitched a ride along with me. When they landed on my skin, it was all I could do not to scream out in pain due to nerves going haywire.
Somehow I remembered some childhood advice about singing when you stub your toe to take your mind off the pain. I began to search frantically in my brain for a song – ANY song – to sing so I could focus on something other than what was happening, and these are the lyrics I grabbed onto:
You stay the same through the ages. Your love never changes.
There may be pain in the night, but joy comes in the morning.
I’m sure the EMT’s thought I had lost every last marble, because I was sobbing and singing at the same time, and it was challenging to carry any sort of tune given the circumstances. But sing, I did. And I knew that I knew that I knew the Lord was with me.
As a worship leader and a jazz musician and singer-songwriter-performer, I know the lyrics to thousands of songs. I could have landed on Old MacDonald, or Bohemian Rhapsody, or the theme song to Gilligan’s Island. But I didn’t.
How was it possible for my thoughts to land on that life-giving lyric when I was lying on a gurney wrestling against fear and panic and pain? How is it possible today for any of us to call up much-needed Scriptures while we’re in the midst of chaos or turmoil?
I think one answer can be found in Hebrews 10:15-16 which reads, “The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says: “This is the covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord. I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.”
Write them on their minds.
What is written on your mind right now? Take a moment for a quick self-assessment, and be honest. Are you courting fear? Listening to worry? Entertaining hopelessness?
Or are you partnering with truth, partnering with the Word of God that promises that joy will come with the morning?
If you want a booster shot of joy this Christmas season, try this exercise for a few minutes a day, every day. Turn off the news, silence your phone, and look up one of the dozens of verses in Scripture that mentions joy and read it aloud to yourself. Pray it over yourself and your family, meditate on it, and ask God to show you how to make that verse come alive in your day.
As we allow the truth of God’s Word to seep into our being, the Holy Spirit will do as He says and write His words onto our minds. That’s what makes it possible to choose joy, no matter what our circumstances may be.
Author A.S. Mackey is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and the American Christian Fiction Writers organization (ACFW). She serves as secretary of the Shoals Writers Guild in Florence, Alabama where she currently lives. She is represented by Elizabeth Bennett at the Transatlantic Literary Agency, and her debut middle grade fiction novel was published in May of 2020 with Lifeway.
