6 Practical Ways to Build Joy: Present or Just Available?

0:00 Joy is developed communally. Joy, in many cases, is developed communally. So in community, in relationship, this is where.

0:11 We experience joy. It is being the apple of someone's eye.

0:17 And so it begins by being the apple of God's eye and then experiencing that and experiencing moments of his.

0:26 Goodness and his character, okay?

0:27 Okay?

0:28 So we're going to start small. We're going to start daily.

0:30 We're going to zone out here, zoom out, if you will, into weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly strategies. As you listen to this episode today, I hope that you decide to take just one thing. Like what is the one thing, because there's a lot of content here, what is one thing that you want to use in order to be.

0:50 Able to build joy strength in your life?

0:56 The world is competing for your time, attention, and identity. But what if your greatest legacy is that you were famous at home? I am so excited about today's episode, part two on joy.

1:14 We are going to get very practical.

1:16 Last week, if you listened, I laid a foundation for relational joy, looked at joy through scripture, even how God established feasts and built joy into the calendar, moments and celebrations of remembrance, celebrations of remembrance, ways to celebrate because often we just get moving from thing to thing to thing.

1:36 And so today what I'd like to do is I'd like to jump in and identify practical ways that we can experience joy in our lives.

1:49 As we do, I want.

1:51 To make sure that we understand that joy is an overflow of our relationship with God himself, that it comes out of abiding in him. So you can go back and listen to that episode that I talked about last week. I hope that it goes without saying that time with Him is where we learn how to trust that He is good, and we learn how to trust His character.

2:19 Time with Him and time in the Word of God. We have to understand the truth about who He is. In John 1, the Word is God. The Word became flesh. So he is the word. We need to be in the word and receiving the truth of the word and abiding in his word and abiding in his presence in order to be able to understand where joy genuinely comes from because it is.

2:49 A fruit of the spirit of God.

2:51 That means we have to have the spirit of God within us and be abiding and inviting the and soaking in that joy. The reason this is important is because I remember as a young man going back through scriptures and wanting to understand what was character. In other words, what would it be to be a man of character?

3:13 And every time that I read through the scriptures, a man of character was followed By suffering. In other words, you go to Romans 5, verse 3-5, it says to rejoice in suffering.

3:27 Rejoice! Rejoice!

3:29 This is another joyful word, to rejoice in suffering. James writes the same thing. Consider it all joy of those who experience trial and tribulation. Why? Because with suffering comes perseverance. Perseverance, character, and character, hope, and hope. that is in Christ Jesus through the Spirit of God will not disappoint. Here's the reality of that though. When we are in the middle of the suffering, we don't feel like rejoicing. And the reason this happens is because we end up learning to trust our past circumstances or we drown out We forget.

4:14 We ultimately forget that my current circumstances do not define who I am or where I'm going.

4:21 Who I am and where I'm going.

4:23 Are in my identity in Christ, and my circumstances currently do not determine that. My circumstances, in many cases, are actually separated from that, but it's the suffering, it's the current circumstances that that ultimately shape who we are and who we're becoming so that we can experience the joy in even more radical ways. The problem is, is we live in a Western individualistic culture that has so many opportunities to be able to drown out our pain, to be able to numb out our suffering. And those are all left brain experiences that, especially if you're turning to screens or that sort of thing, that's the thing, it's all left brain. It's not relational, it's not joyful. We're turning away from God rather than toward God in drowning

5:13 out the uncomfortable feelings. And feelings work like this. In emotional intelligence, when you drown out uncomfortable emotion, what you're actually also doing is you drown out the positive. You can't suppress, repress, or deny uncomfortable feelings. and expect to experience all the goodness of joy and happiness and delight over on this other side.

5:38 It's not possible.

5:40 And this is why people turn to drugs, it's why they turn to behavioral addiction, chemical addiction, is because they need to have a dopamine hit. They need to have pleasure, pleasurable experience in order to get that joyful high, that experience, but it's void. of the Lord, it's void of experiencing joy.

6:02 All we're doing is dopamine hits to feel happiness in the moment. And so what we end up doing is rather than experiencing joy with even grief and sorrow, we end up drowning out the grief and sorrow and we can only experience joy or happiness by way of pleasure. And we just continually seek out the pleasure in our lives.

6:23 And what we do is we just relationally drown out and forget our identity and the idea that, not the idea, but the reality, the truth that God is with us, that he is God with us, that he is Emmanuel, God with us. And so today, I want to get super practical on this. I think it was important for me to be able to identify, hey, look, this is where it's all coming from. Last week, I talked about the feasts. And today, I really want us to understand that joy neurobiologically is the idea that you are the apple of somebody's eye. Or that when my kids walk into the room, that they experience that I, they are the apple of my eye. Now, I want you to think about this in relation to God the Father. Imagine

7:17 what your child is experiencing when they walk into a room and they see you light up because they're there. They know they are safe. They know they are loved. They know that they are cherished and that you delight in them. Now, I want you to imagine what it looks like. Think about this for a second in your life.

7:37 Just take a moment. Think back.

7:40 On when you walked into a room when you were a kid, maybe it was you walked into a room and someone was delighted to be with you. You were the apple of somebody's eye. It could have been a coach. It could have been a parent, a grandparent, an aunt and uncle. It could have been a teacher, a pastor. You walked into the room and you were the bee's knees.

7:56 It was like you were the only person in the.

7:58 World to them.

7:59 And they loved you and you were delighted in. Think about that person. Just close your eyes and think about the moment. immerse yourself in that moment for a second. And by the way, for some of you, you may not have had that one person in your life. And I just wanna say that I'm really sorry if you did not have that one person. I believe every child deserves to know that they are cherished and delighted in.

8:26 Maybe it was a pet for you. Maybe it was a golden retriever. Golden retrievers and dogs genuinely are some of the most beautiful animals on the planet. to help us feel that we are the bee's knees. Where did you experience that joy? Now I want you to take that times a gazillion, times an infinity, and that's how the Father delights in you. That's how delighted you are the apple of His eye. The Heavenly Father loves you, and you are the apple of His eye. This is why the Word says that we love others because He first loved us. So, I want you to experience that love.

9:09 I want you to experience that because joy relationally is that experience of feeling safe and loved and cherished. Now, how do we do that? How do we do that practically? Let me give you a brief framework for how this plays out. And then I want to give you some very practical ways we can do this daily, weekly, even quarterly and yearly. What are ways that we can schedule joy into our lives? Because as I said last week, your calendar is discipling you. Have we built joy into our calendar? Before we get into that framework, I want to introduce you to and say thank you to our sponsor, Bernhardt Watches. Let's talk about an American watch brand that's been building timepieces for more than 20 years, Bernhardt Watch Company.

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10:43 Coming out of there, I love it. I love Bernhardt Watch. I'm wearing one right now on my wrist, and I always say, if the greatest red carpet you'll ever walk is through your front door, get a Bernhardt so you can be on time. All right, there we go. There's my dad joke of the day. All right, let's look at the framework. Number one is to receive. I want you to think about these R's. Number one is to receive.

11:05 Where in your day can you receive the goodness of God? I talked about this last week in Philippians chapter four. when we laid out the framework for thanking God, when you turn to God in prayer, he says, don't be anxious about anything, Paul writes, but in everything, with prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, present your request to God. So the with thanksgiving part is experiencing the goodness of God.

11:32 Where in your day do you experience the goodness of God? For me lately as a dad, these are so subjective. These moments are so subjective. Why?

11:42 Because they're all right brain experiences.

11:44 You can't concoct them. You can't orchestrate them. You can't schedule them. These are experiences you can't necessarily manufacture in your own life. These are experiences. Where in a day do you just understand and appreciate the goodness of God? Where I experience this as a dad is when I see my kids belly laughing at something. When I see my children in their innocence ask a question or notice something for the first time and their eyes light up and they get real big and their jaw drops to the floor. Or experiencing a simple quiet moment with my wife where we get to just be together. Going for a walk through the woods or sitting together on our Adirondack chairs and just holding hands and just closing your

12:42 eyes and taking a deep breath in in that moment. It may only last for 30 seconds, but you have an experience of the goodness of God in your life in the moment. Where is that for you? Okay, receive that. Learn to receive those in the moment. And then depending on what it is, This is where I'll get to this in a little bit. We wanna relive these moments, okay?

13:10 Relive them. So you don't just, this is what I was talking last week about Philippians 4. This goes beyond a thank you gratitude list. Write your list out, write your list out. That's a very left brain experience if you write the list out and then you just label it. Hey, thank you, thank you, thank you. But when you immerse yourself in it, close your eyes. Imagine yourself there. Who was there with you? Where were you? What did you smell?

13:37 What did you taste? What did you see? What did you hear? And who else was there with you? And what did their face look like? What did you feel? What emotions were you feeling? Relive the moment. Thank God for it. Sit in the goodness of it. And then rejoice. This isn't just about expressing joy. It's about taking it in and experiencing it, okay? It's not just expressing it.

14:09 Expressing is one thing, and that's beautiful. Dance, like scream, run around, laugh, express it, but also experience it. Hold on to it, possess it, the joy in those moments, and then remember them, okay?

14:28 So the reason that.

14:32 I talk about remembering is is because we want to build traditions, rituals into our schedule, activities, feasts into our schedule, even telling stories, having folklore that gets passed down from generation to generation about stories of goodness and joy and how God came through in our lives. Remember, create remembrance, another way to experience joy. So let me walk us through this experience, okay? I want to walk us through practical strategies for being able to do this. Before I do that, I want to remind you, Living Legacy, men, it's filling up. January, we'll go through the whole year in 2027 with a group of men, a small group of men, where we will learn and experience what it is to be emotionally safe husbands, relationally warm fathers, pillars

15:31 in our local community, and live these things out, becoming joyful fathers and husbands and men in our communities, leaders in our communities.

15:41 I would love for you to check that out. It's in the show notes today.

15:44 So let me walk through some daily strategies for building joy and your joy strength in your life. And I want to say it this way, okay? Joy is developed communally. Joy, in many cases, is developed communally. So in community, in relationship, this is where we experience joy. It is being the apple of someone's eye. And so it begins by being the apple of God's eye and then experiencing that and experiencing moments of his goodness and his character, okay? Okay?

16:25 So we're gonna start small, we're gonna start daily, we're gonna zone out here, zoom out, if you will, into weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly strategies. As you listen to this episode today, I hope that you decide to take just one thing. Like what is the one thing, because there's a lot of content here, what is one thing that you want to use in order to be able to build joy, strength in your life? Okay, so number one, let's look at this, daily. I call it immersive gratitude. You've already heard me talking about it. Immersive gratitude. Go lay in the grass. Last week I did this. I went, there was a moment during my day where I went and I just laid in the grass. I laid there like a snow angel, like you would make a snow angel.

17:06 And I laid in the grass and I looked up at the sky and I was just watching the clouds. It's all that I did is I watched the crowds and I closed my eyes and I just imagined being a kid again in my backyard growing up because I had a lot of joy there. And I just laid there and then I opened my eyes and I watched for different figures in the clouds and looking for whatever shapes I could make out. I just laid there and I just immersed myself in the goodness of the day, in the goodness of God. By the way, that was in the middle of in-between coaching sessions. So I had like 10 minutes and I just, instead of checking my email, instead of checking Instagram, instead of doing any of that, I went straight out to the yard. I laid down

17:47 and I just looked up at the sky. That's what I did. Mike, okay, so immersive gratitude. Just thank God. Immerse yourself in moments that you can just thank him. Thank him for the things that you have, your health, the roof over your head, your job, your children, your spouse, the vacation you get to take, the fall break you get to have, the apple cider you're drinking right now, the coffee you had this morning, the breath that you just took, the ability to be able to see, the ability to be able to feel with your hands. and your legs, the ability to be able to, because there's people who cannot, there's people out there who've had strokes or have been paralyzed or who can't experience these things.

18:31 So imagine if you can experience these things, don't take them for granted.

18:37 Sit in them. Enjoy them. Thank God for them. Don't take them for granted.

18:43 Immerse in gratitude. Immerse yourself in the gratitude of the things that God has given you. Which leads to number two, microdose joy. Microdose joy. I think a lot of times what we end up doing is we wait for big moments to experience joy. In fact, one of the most difficult parts about joy is foreboding joy. This is where we will push off joy because we're afraid that if we experience joy, then we're waiting for the other shoe to drop and something bad is going to happen. So if you don't want to experience big moments of joy, then microdose it, okay? If your fear level is such that, man, if I hold a celebration, then X, Y, or Z might happen. By the way, that's superstition, and we need to pay attention to the fear that's in our own

19:32 lives with that and take that to God in prayer. But the reality is, is that you can microdose joy. What does microdosing joy mean? Microdosing joy is actually doing what I just kind of said that I did with immersive gratitude. You can kind of combine these But microdiversions, joy is being able to lay in the grass for a few seconds. Jesus actually gives us an example of this in Matthew chapter six. In Matthew chapter six, in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, don't worry about your life, but consider the birds of the air. He says, consider the birds of Now, what does it mean to consider?

20:08 It means to look intently upon. It means to actually think about their wellbeing. They did not have a refrigerator or freezer with food last night. They didn't have a roof over their head. And yet how God took care of them and how much more worthy are you is what Jesus said. But what he says is consider the birds.

20:27 What would it look like to walk outside or whenever you notice a bird and you just stare at it and you watch it, just take 30 seconds to watch it Consider its colors. Consider where it was last night. Consider what it's doing right now, especially if it's singing. How cool is it that it's singing? The sound that it makes, the unique sound that it makes, the unique colors that it has, that God created it in all of his goodness. Consider the birds or the flowers of the field. They don't have clothes, but yet they are clothed, right?

21:04 The lilies of the field.

21:06 Look at the flower. Look at the sky.

21:09 Look at the birds. Go out in God's creation. Experience God's creation as you microdose joy. Another way to microdose joy is to be able to sit in and just watch your kids. Listen to the questions they make. Sit down and color with them.

21:27 Paint with them.

21:28 Play a game with them. Listen to their questions. Experience their childlike wonder with them. It is so glorious to be able to do that. But what we do is we move from thing to thing to thing. So microdose joy in your day. Again, these are small 30 second moments. The next one I have for daily joy strength is enthusiastic welcoming. Think about welcoming your kids and your spouse enthusiastically into the room. You put a smile on your face.

22:05 whether they come down for breakfast from just waking up in the morning, whether you're coming in through the door for the first time of the day, or they're coming back from school, or wherever it is with your spouse and with your kids, be glad to see them. Help them know that you delight in them with an enthusiastic welcoming.

22:28 In other words, don't be on your phone. Welcome them enthusiastically.

22:33 One of the ways.

22:34 that our kids, and you've heard me talk about this if you've listened to the podcast for any length of time, is that we talk about continuous partial attention and how continuous partial attention, or I call it secondhand scream time, is actually inhibiting the pleasure center of a child's brain because when they come into the presence of their parent and their parent is distracted on their phone, the child learns that they don't have the full attention of the parent and therefore the parent, the child takes the message, well, Maybe they don't delight in me the way that they delight in what they're doing. That's a sad realization for all of us. Pay full focused attention, full focused enthusiastic attention,

23:18 an enthusiastic welcoming of your kids and your spouse after you have not been in their presence for a period of time. Imagine, imagine the joy that they just get to experience by being delighted in. but I'm telling you, it does something to our soul as well as we enthusiastically welcome them because we know that we do delight in them. And these are micro doses of joy that I experience where I'm not necessarily the apple of someone's eye, but man, what I'm giving to my kids, what I'm giving to Christy, beautiful. Like I know that I'm experiencing the joy in the moment as well. So immersive gratitude, daily practices, immersive gratitude, microdose joy, and give enthusiastic welcoming.

24:07 I'm talking just enthusiastic welcoming of those around you that you love and do life with.

24:14 All right, let's go to the weekly one.

24:16 This is one that I could do an entire episode on, an entire series on, but we know that God designed from the very beginning of creation.

24:29 A Sabbath.

24:31 A Sabbath day to keep it holy. And so I want you to think about this for a second. The Sabbath day, the very first thing that Adam and Eve were asked to do was to rest. They were created on day six. God rested on day seven. What we do in our home, I'm going to make this short. We have this in a famous home book. You can check that out on how we actually schedule our Sabbath day.

24:57 But we start on Friday sundown and we end on Saturday sundown. The reason we do that is because Sunday is a pretty full day for us. And so with serving at church and doing all the other things, with going out with friends, or we have community and stuff that we do life with on Sundays. And so Saturday is our day as a family to really Sabbath well.

25:16 And we start that on Friday night with a Shabbat dinner, which means Sabbath. It means Sabbath peace, Shabbat shalom, Sabbath peace, rest. It means to cease. to cease from working, to cease from doing. And we have a dinner with our family and we have the best dessert of the week on Friday night so that our kids can taste the goodness of God. They can taste and know that the Lord is good. And so they love having the best dessert on Friday night because it's the beginning of rest. It's the beginning of entering into Saturday. And our kids have learned to love Saturdays where we enter into soul rest, where we allow one day a week for our soul to catch up to our bodies. for our souls, our being to catch up to our doing. And so if

26:01 you want more on a Sabbath, let me know. I can do another episode on this. You can go to our website, famoushome.com slash podcast, put in your questions, put in your topics you want us to cover. And I can go ahead and do a whole episode just on Sabbath and what we do and how we structure it and that sort of thing. You can also check it out in the Famous Homebook. But one time a week is why Jesus said this. He said that Sabbath is Man was not made for Sabbath, but Sabbath for the man.

26:30 In other words, it was a gift from God. Just like we don't need to practice the feasts anymore. We don't need to practice Sabbath. But man, are they gifts that we can go back and implement into our lives, given to us by God, implemented. Listen, there's a reason the ground needs to rest in order for it to birth life again. We are the same. We are not machines.

26:56 As much as this culture would say that you're a machine, you are not a machine. You are a human being. Sabbath was created to help you with your being. All right, which leads to monthly and or quarterly. We can go monthly or quarterly on this. I kind of laid it all out where... Essentially what we would like to do, and I think this is, and by the way, I want you to think about this particular question as it relates to this. As you think about monthly and quarterly, does my family experience me as present or do they experience me as merely available? Do they experience me as present or do they experience me as merely available? How do we increase our presence throughout a day? These are practices that allow us to be able to do that.

27:47 And so you can ask this question, who needs to experience my delight in them this month? Who in my family needs me to experience, who needs to experience my, they need me to enter into their world so they can experience my delight in them That could be your spouse. It could be your children. It could be your coworkers.

28:08 It could be people that you serve. I don't know who that is, but think about that question in light of as you set up celebrations that are monthly and quarterly. The reason I say this is because again, These feasts were designed in order to implement joy throughout the Jewish culture and tradition. God designed it that way to build joy into the schedule. Now, how do we have that in our culture today? We have that through birthdays, birthday celebrations.

28:38 Make your birthday celebrations absolutely phenomenal. The child, your spouse... just feels fully delighted in. We have birthdays, we have holidays, we have vacations, we have traditions, we have family reunions. What are the rhythms in your calendar already that you can put, and this goes for the yearly as well, so you can think once a month, and this is how I tend to think about it, is once a month, who needs me to delight in them? But then as you lay out a yearly plan, In your year, what are the feasts? What are the celebrations? What are the ways that you are remembering God's goodness in your life?

29:22 And how are you mapping that out so that you are building joy into the calendar? Where are we intentionally scheduling joy in the next 12 months? You can think of anniversaries and how you celebrate your anniversary with your kids and how you invite your kids into your own wedding day or your marriage and you celebrate. The Bible says to honor marriage, to hold it in high honor and high esteem. How do we honor marriage with our kids?

29:52 Honor your anniversary. Honor your birthdays.

29:56 Don't let these celebrations go by lacklusterly, if you will. Because what happens is, is we end up giving them, we give those holidays the leftovers, our leftovers. Because we're scheduling, we'll schedule our businesses, we'll schedule our sports, we'll schedule our activities, we'll schedule our lives. And the celebrations go by the wayside. And we just end up thinking that one day joy will be a byproduct of our busy lives and what we're accomplishing. And the reality is that is not true. We need to continually be building joy strength into our lives and into our calendars. So plan the celebrations. By the way, this is not necessarily easy to do because in many cases you might be the one hosting in your local community. But biblical hospitality, the

30:45 experience of relationally connecting with your community and helping your community feel seen and loved and heard and appreciated is what builds joy, strength in our local communities. This is what the church is all about. This is what the church is meant to be. And this is how we build relational joy. And so if you've been isolating yourselves, if you've been feeling alone, find the people in your life that you can feel safe with, that you can invite, that you can celebrate with, that you can do life with in this joyful way.

31:22 By the way, it's not going to be without conflict.

31:24 Our closest friends on the planet, it's not like we are always dancing and singing and living in joy. No, true community is speaking truth and love to each other. It's experiencing hard parts of life. It's experiencing, it's rejoicing in the suffering because on the other side of it, it's like if you've been married for any length of time, you know that healthy conflict, when it is resolved well, leads to deeper intimacy. This is where suffering leads to deeper intimacy with Christ and a joy that surpasses all understanding. Why?

32:02 Because look what happens on the other side of it. We know where we're going. We know whose we are. And we know the outcome that is to come. So when you're in those difficult moments, you don't even have to focus on the moment. You don't have to feel happy in the moment. It's not happiness. Joy is a state of being that we choose based upon who we are and where we are going. The hope that we have in Christ Jesus. Romans 5, 3 through 5. Rejoice in suffering. With suffering comes perseverance. Perseverance, character, and character, hope, and hope in Christ Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit will not disappoint. It is the joy of the Lord that is our strength. Man, there's so much more on joy that I'd like to do. And I

32:51 think maybe in the next episode, we will come back and perhaps touch on joy again. There are some immersive experiences that we could do. It would be a different type of episode because it would be an episode where I have you sit and do some immersive experiences on the episode or maybe go through them with you. But that's what joy is all about. So we have immersive gratitude.

33:15 We've got microdosing joy. We've talked about enthusiastically welcoming those that you love, establishing your traditions, establishing your rituals, establishing story, folklore that's passed from one generation to the next, celebrating anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, vacations, traditions, and scheduling those feasts into your calendar and also prioritizing that it is the goodness of God that.

33:42 We get to celebrate. It is because of who.

33:45 We are in him and where we are going and what we're building for that we get to celebrate. This is what I don't see a lot of in families today, and this is what we can build together.

33:58 So I hope this episode was helpful for you.

34:00 If you want more of this and you have any topics or anything that came to your mind, or you have questions, you're like, hey, how do I implement this?

34:07 Or Help me understand this.

34:09 Or you have even an idea of a guest or you have an idea of a topic that you'd like us to cover.

34:14 Go to famoushome.com slash podcast.

34:16 Put it there. Topics, questions, we will answer those and get back to you on those. And we love journeying with you. So if this episode was helpful for you, send it to a friend, send it to a family member. This is how people find out about it. Until next week, keep in mind that the greatest red carpet you will walk is through your front door. Thank you for listening to the Famous at Home podcast. If this episode was helpful for you, would you consider sharing with a friend, a coworker, a family member? And go wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review. This is how people find out about it. And if you're interested in any of our coaching programs, check out famousathome.com or the show notes for more information. Keep in mind that the

35:04 greatest red carpet you will ever walk is through your front door.