Why We've Lost Our Joy (And Where To Find It)

0:00 We have that threat to our sense of connection, belonging, safety, or dignity. That's when we go into fight or flight. And our brain in that moment isn't thinking about relational connection and joy and all these things. It is trying to fight a bear or it's trying to flee from the bear. That's what it's doing, right? And so this is where we shut down. This is where fear inhibits our ability to show up well. And we lose a sense of who we really are in connection to other people.

0:33 How do we move away from this? How do we move away from this rat race.

0:38 To getting to a place where we feel safe so that we can experience joy? Now, this is not something that is a feeling. Happiness is based on circumstances. Joy is based on position. The world is competing for your time, attention, and identity. But what if your greatest legacy is that you were famous at home? We want to start today by thanking 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. Bernhardt assembles and regulates its watches in the USA. They service them in-house, and they even paint and pad print dials themselves. It's the revival of American watchmaking. They believe in quality materials and honest

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2:11 Hey guys, it is a delight to be with you today. I use that word delight on purpose today. Of course, I do love that word. but it is fall. I've got, if you're watching this on YouTube, I've got my fall flannel attire on. I am feeling very joyful. Yes, I sound probably a little bit under the weather. I am fighting a little something, but it is okay. It is the season, right? So I am excited to And let me just state that. I think what's fascinating about what I just said is I'm fighting a little something that makes you feel a little bit under the weather, but at the same time, I'm living in joy. And that's the topic I want to talk about today. I didn't even intentionally do that. It's just I want to do

2:58 a couple weeks here on joy because it's so easy to talk about What we're missing in our culture, what we don't have.

3:07 Why we're exhausted, why we're busy, why we're all the things. But what are the remedies to that?

3:12 We've been talking this fall about the two degree shifts that help us enter into the hearts of our loved ones, the two degree shifts that help us show up differently in our work.

3:22 And at home.

3:23 And that's what I want to pitch to us today is this idea of joy.

3:30 The Bible says that the joy of the Lord is our strength.

3:35 So why are we not talking about joy enough when we talk about strength, especially in the context of leadership? We don't talk enough about this because I think we're so busy in leadership in particular, we bounce from one thing to the next. If you're a parent watching this, if you're a, a mom, if you're a dad, forget leadership.

3:56 Just go to the home. We live in fight or flight so much in our culture. We're so busy that our to-do list takes everything up that we're missing the joyful moments and we aren't paying attention because we're constantly living in the future. And joy is a present tense experience. It is a present tense experience. The trouble is, is we often live in the future. So in other words, let's just say, We do accomplish something. We get the dishes done at home.

4:25 Oh, that's awesome.

4:26 Now, all of a sudden, I've got to clean the countertops. Now, all of a sudden, I got to get the laundry done. Now, all of a sudden, I got to get the kids ready for bed. Now, all of a sudden, we got to pack their lunches for tomorrow. Now, all of a sudden, we have to get... And you see how we miss joy.

4:41 Let's take that to the leadership component. we get the project done, we write the book, we celebrate for five minutes, and then we move on to the next project, and we move on to the next thing. And this is what happens when we do not schedule joy. And I'm gonna talk about joy in multiple different ways. So I want us to see it theologically, I want us to see it neurobiologically, And I want to give us some very practical ways to increase our joy strength, what Jim Wilder describes in The Other Half of Church. And so I'd highly recommend that book. Fantastic read. The idea of what joy is and how we build our joy strength, particularly in the context of community, which is one of the ways that we will be talking about it. I

5:28 want to set us up, though, before we even dive into this, with the idea that this is a problem in our culture, that we do not experience joy. By the way, if you're a parent listening to this, there's a trickle-down effect of anxiety onto kids into the next generation from your home.

5:46 There's also a trickle-down effect of joy. Remember, more is caught than taught in our homes.

5:50 And so as we look at this, one of the things that I have done, and if you've listened to us on the podcast, we have a lot of new listeners on the podcast, so I just want to welcome you. I've talked about this before, but I feel like I'm someone who's growing in it. I don't feel like I have certainly arrived in this whole idea of joy, but I talk about narrowing my parenting down into two primary filters.

6:13 Number one, am I emotionally safe enough that my children will bring me everything, that they can bring me anything that they've done wrong. They can bring me their sin. They can bring me all of, they can bring me a struggle that they're having. They can bring me anything, their joys. They want to share it with me. That's number one. Number two, was I a joyful dad? I think if I can get those two things right, that everything else will take care of itself as I study the data, as I look at the research.

6:37 And so.

6:39 This is what I get passionate about. And so, by the way, if you're a leader in here or you're a dad, you're a father, you are someone in your local community who wants to build this in your own life, we have the Living Legacy cohort coming up in January. We're launching another one in January that will go all throughout 2027. It's a one-year program. coaching, we get into becoming a rock solid husband, having a rock solid marriage, being a relationally warm father, emotionally safe husband, relationally warm father, and then pillars in our local communities to build for the kingdom of God. What does it look like to hear the voice of Jesus in our lives? And how does that impact who we're around? And how will we

7:17 build joy strength as men, as leaders in our homes, in our businesses, in our communities? How do we build this? Man, I would love for you to join us. You can check that out in the show notes today. It's only for a small limited number of men. So please check it out because it will be filling up here very soon and don't want you to miss that in 2027.

7:39 I would love to journey with you. We meet every single week. We meet weekly. This is an intense group of men where we get into each other's lives. The community itself is worth the price of admission, just in terms of who you get to be around and learn from, and you get a community. That's part of what joy is about, is having community, having a brotherhood. And so we'd love for you to check that out. As we jump into the conversation today, I really want us to, I wrote a couple questions down as I have here in my hand. If you're watching this on YouTube, I wrote a couple questions down. I was really studying this topic specifically because I'm doing a deep dive into it.

8:17 I want to learn how to have more joy in my life. That's what I want to learn. How do I have more joy in my life? I have three different questions I wrote down here that I'd love for you to ask yourself.

8:25 Number one is this.

8:26 When was the last time you were genuinely delighted by someone that you love? In other words, you walked into a room and you felt like you were the apple of their eye, or you walked into a room, or you were in a room, and you just delighted in the relationship that you had with your kids.

8:43 You felt delighted with your spouse. Next question.

8:48 When was the last time your spouse or your children experienced your face lighting up simply because they walked into the room? that your face just lit up when you walked into the room or when they walked into the room or you walked into the room. So whether you're coming home from work or you're coming home from running errands or whatever it is and you walk into the home and you see everybody or when everyone's just waking up in the morning and they come downstairs and you're.

9:14 Delighted, your face lights up to see them.

9:19 And then does your family experience you primarily as someone who is proud of what they accomplish? or as someone who delights in their existence. How do your loved ones experience you? This is, by the way, the reason I talk about this is because we lose relational joy, and I think it's primarily because we are, number one, living in fight or flight, so it's our to-do lists that are consistently keeping us busy, and we miss the everyday moments, And then I think number two, because we're so future oriented, that we complete a project and we're moving on to the next one. It's like we cannot stay. We have a very difficult time being present in the moment. Now, why is this important? Let me explain this just for

10:13 a second because I think this is really important as.

10:16 We talk about this. We stay stuck in the left brain.

10:22 So it used to be described that, you know, if you were a mathematical person or an analytical person, you were a left brain person. If you were an experiential person, you were a right brain person. Or if you were an artistic, sorry, if you were an artistic person, you were a right brain person. That's not actually true. What's true is that we are both left and right brained, and the left side of the brain is the linguistic here and now logical part of the brain. The right side of the brain is that experiential part of the brain.

10:48 That's where I made this slip up earlier. It's the experiential here and now part of the brain. It's the part of the brain where we're experiencing something in the moment. Now, when we are consistently living on our screens, let's say for example, so you go to work, you wake up, you're in your screen, you're on your phone, you're scrolling through Instagram, No shame, no condemnation here.

11:11 This is part of our lives. This is what we do. Anytime we are.

11:14 On a screen, we are in left brain. We're just in left brain, okay? All of our joy strength, all of our relational connections, all of our identity lives in the right brain. So when you are experiencing, this is why I asked these questions early on, when someone walks into a room and they see you light up, That's a right brain experience. When you walk into a room and someone you love lights up, that's a right brain experience.

11:48 The right brain, the right side of the brain is processing information faster than the left side of the brain. Okay, the left side of the brain is where we put strategy together. It's, I mean, it is what helps us stay. It's what keeps our businesses running. It's what keeps our families running in many ways. Like it's, those are the to-do lists right there, right? But the right side of the brain is processing information six times a second. The left side of the brain processes it at five times a second. So these are two very different sides of the brain. And as I said earlier, the right side of the brain is asking the question, what would my people do in this situation? It's connected to identity. Christy

12:28 and I just spoke at a church this past weekend, and one of the things that we were identifying with them as we were having conversation about this very topic is when they walked into that church, right? I mean, there's a few hundred people there. you know, they're all in this environment, you know, talking about marriage and parenting.

12:47 So it's already set up in such a way that, man, I'm coming here. Is my wife or is my husband going to, you know, what kind of conversation are we going to end up having? But you're also walking in, your body, your brain is scanning the room to experience, am I safe? In other words, you're looking, and this is what ends up happening is, is we, without even putting language to it, We're looking for the people that are safe in our lives. We're looking for anybody else that we know. Your eyes are scanning the room to feel where you can feel most connected. You're gonna walk to the people that you know. That's what our brains are doing. So you see why the right side of the brain is actually trying to get your sense of

13:26 safety and your bearings and your sense of belonging and dignity. This is the right side of the brain. This is what it's doing. So whenever you. In the middle of a day and you're missing connection with people, let's say you're missing the ability to be able to be present in a moment because you're moving from thing to thing to thing. When we have that threat to our sense of connection, belonging, safety, or dignity, that's when we go into fight or flight. And our brain in that moment isn't thinking about relational connection and joy and all these things. It is trying to fight a bear. or it's trying to flee from the bear.

14:09 That's what it's doing, right? And so this is where we shut down. This is where fear inhibits our ability to show up well, and we lose a sense of who we really are in connection to other people. How do we move away from this? How do we move away from this rat race to getting to a place where we feel safe so that we can experience joy? Now, this is not something that is a feeling, okay? I want to make sure that we identify that. What we're not talking about is happiness. Happiness is based on circumstances.

14:49 Joy is based on position. It is based on your position in Christ Jesus. It is the joy of the Lord that is our strength. It is coming from his presence. It is coming from Now, I want you to think about something for a second. So I did this little deep dive into the Hebrew and Greek words on joy. And what I found was that there are four primary Hebrew words and two primary Greek words for joy that are used throughout the Old and New Testaments. And this isn't the idea that I feel good because something good happened to my life, in my life. What this really comes down to, joy, relationally, and joy scripturally is that God is with me. God is with me. God, by the way, is good. I talk about this in Philippians 4,

15:42 where Paul says to be anxious for nothing, but by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving present your request to God. Going to God in prayer with thanksgiving is entering into prayer with gratitude. It doesn't matter what your life circumstances are. You're obviously going to God because you're anxious about something in your life. So that fear, that anxiety, he's saying, come, bring it to me in prayer.

16:06 Let me have it. You give it to me.

16:08 Verbalize your experiences in prayer, but do it in the context of goodness, who I am. Do it in the context of gratitude. You know, neuroscience research, it's found that Anxiety and gratitude cannot coexist in the brain at the same time. So the more grateful we are, the less it pushes anxiety out, the less we'll experience anxiety in the moment. But even that gratitude has to be experiential.

16:37 It goes beyond just putting a gratitude list together. You can wake up in the morning and write down three things you're grateful for, but there's something very different because that's a left brain experience. There's something very different about right brain experiencing that joy. What would it look like to sit in and meditate on a moment where you experienced true joy in your life, maybe as a child?

16:59 You look back on your life as a child and you just sat in it. You just loved it. There was a moment jumping in leaves. It's the fall, apple cider, right? These visceral moments that you experienced joy in your life. I think back to going to college football games with my dad, like the sounds, the taste of apple cider and we had caramel apples and as we were tailgating.

17:23 These are the things that take me back, and I'm grateful for fall because they take me back to childhood. They take me back to these moments that I experienced joy, and I'm grateful to God for the goodness that he gave me in my life, that he has not left me nor forsaken me. Though I walk through the valley of shadow of death, I fear no evil. Though my finances might not be strong right now, though we might be struggling with illness right now, though we might be just relationally exhausted right now, though our kids might be overwhelmed with school right now, I don't know what it is for you. No matter those circumstances, we take those to God in prayer with thanksgiving. God, thank you that we get to do the things that we're doing. Thank

18:08 you that we are in the position. Thank you that you are good. Thank you that.

18:13 You are good.

18:15 Theologically, what joy is, is that God is good, he is with me, I belong to him, and therefore I can rejoice even when my circumstances aren't good because it's not about the here and now, it is about what.

18:31 Is to come.

18:32 I know that I know who I am and what.

18:40 How it's going to all play out. I know where I stand positionally. God, thank you that you are so good. So you go down to John chapter 15.

18:49 Jesus says this, that joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. What joy is he referring to? He's referring to it's his joy. It is our relational connection to Christ because what's John 15 all about? That we abide in him. that we stay connected to the vine, that he is the vine, we are the branches, that we stay connected. That's the overflow of joy. Even the fruit of the spirit, love joy. It is botanical growth.

19:25 It is not something that we take on. It is not something that we do. It is something that we experience out of an overflow of our relationship with Christ. And when we're moving from thing to thing to thing, What gets difficult is that we miss joy because we miss our time with him. And it's easy to come to a place where in difficult circumstances you get angry with God because you feel like he wasn't there for you.

19:52 You get angry with God because your finances aren't the way they were supposed to be, or you just experienced a job loss, or you're you have health, terminal illness in your family, or maybe even in your own life, or maybe you just went through another loss, like a miscarriage or something like that. And you're like, God, why would you keep doing this to me? Why would this keep happening? God is big enough. for you to take those fears, those losses, those grievances to him in prayer.

20:24 But remember, spending time with him is also experiencing him at his word and his character and who he is. He loves you with an everlasting love. So when we get into our circumstances, remember Philippians 4. that we can therefore go to him, remember his goodness, abide in him. And it says that then, not until then, left brain, right brain. By the way, I always call the corpus callosum, it's the middle part of the brain between the right and left hemispheres. I call it the binding of the book because when you put language to what it is you're experiencing and you do this with God, what it does is it helps you write a coherent narrative about your life story. And as you write a coherent narrative

21:16 in the presence of God about your life story, what it does is it helps you make sense of who God is and the circumstances in your life and where God is in the middle.

21:27 Of those things.

21:29 And so I really wanted to anchor us here because theologically, this is really important for us to understand in order to get to the practical day-to-day strategies, because as as high capacity leaders, as parents, what do we do? We try to do the things, we try to orchestrate, strategize, implement the strategies to bring more goodness into our lives, when the reality is, is there's, the joy of the Lord is our strength. When David prayed, restore to me the joy of my salvation, That is a call back.

22:13 That is a summoning back to restore our relationship, God.

22:18 Restore us. And what does God do?

22:24 God is so gracious that what is one of the things that he does in the Jewish culture, in the Hebrew calendar? He implemented seven biblical feasts a year. Seven biblical feasts. feasts to schedule joy, to schedule a remembrance of who he is. Now, I want you to think about this just for a second. God would so love us, he would be so good that he would build remembrance and celebration into the biblical calendar. With seven different feasts, how much should we, as we think about it, implement celebration into our calendar. Theologically, I want to show you something that I think is just really important because in Leviticus, in Deuteronomy, as you look back at the Torah and you look back at these biblical feasts, all you see

23:37 over and over and over again is this theme of rejoicing the Lord and And remember, remember that I brought you, remember where I brought you out of.

23:47 Remember the Lord, your God. Remembrance and celebration. Why?

23:54 Because he knew that we would be a forgetful people. God knew that we would be forgetful. And how often as we get into our fight or flight, as we get into building our businesses, building our family, leading our families, going from schedule to schedule to schedule, Do we forget the goodness of God? And so I want you to think about this just for a minute. I want you to think about something. Because I always talk about this, that when we set family values in our family, you're already living by a set of family values right now.

24:29 Those family values, by the way, are dictated.

24:35 You can do two things to tell what your family values are currently. Number one, look at your bank accounts. And number two, look at your schedules. Where are you spending your time and where are you spending your money? That will show what you value in your life and as a family, in your individual life and then as a family. So I want you to think about this.

24:53 If your calendar is discipling you, if your calendar is discipling you, what does your calendar teach you about joy? What is your calendar teaching you about joy? How you spend your time right now, what's it teaching you about joy in your life? Are you celebrating God's goodness in your life on an ongoing basis? Are you remembering? Are you coming back to him? Here's the thing in our society, in our Western individualistic culture, in the go, go, go, high capacity world that we live in, how do you define success? What do you define success as? Usually it's achievement, it's growth, It's numbers, numbers in attendance, numbers in money, numbers in, right? And so we think about those things.

25:46 But nowhere in leadership do I see it said that joy should equal success, that part of what makes us successful is that we're joyful. Usually we think that joy will become a byproduct of what our success becomes. But the reality is, is That's not actually true. Joy will not become a byproduct.

26:11 Why?

26:12 Because we move from thing to thing to thing and we don't see joy as a successful metric in how we live our lives. We just don't view it that way. So we don't schedule it. We don't implement it. We don't practice it. Instead, we just think that, oh, I'm gonna be joyful. No, what we end up being is happy when we reach those metrics. We're happy for a moment and then we move on. That's not joy. So what would it look like to implement joy into your calendar?

26:46 Let me just walk through these real quickly. Seven feasts, Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Pentecost, Trumpets, Day of Atonement, and Tabernacles. These seven biblical feasts were implemented by God for certain reasons, right? Every one of them has their own biblical significance as to what they were doing, okay? I'm not going to go through all of these in this podcast episode, but if you're interested, you can take a look. I mean, you can look this up online. You can study these.

27:18 I would highly recommend it, and I could go through them at some point. But one of the things that I love is the Feast of Trumpets. The Feast of Trumpets itself was a sacred return It was interrupting your lifestyle, your busyness to return back to your own soul, to let your body and your soul catch up to each other.

27:45 to return back to the Lord, to experience. And this fell in the seventh month, which if you, that was in the biblical calendar. But I mean, if you look at the seventh month in here in the Western world, what is that?

27:57 That's July.

27:58 This is like a summer return to the Lord. Like let your soul catch up to your body and return. And again, we're not bound by the law to practice these feasts. But what could be the potential equivalent in your own life? We take a summer vacation, but what does that summer vacation, what are you doing to celebrate and remember and return.

28:21 Back to the Lord? What does that feast look like?

28:26 Another one that I absolutely love is the Feast of Tabernacles, which we just came out of here in the fall, here in the Western world. And this is when you build a temporary shelter. You realize that this earth is temporary. but you celebrate God's provision while you are on this earth. You celebrate his provision. that you have a roof over your head, that he is good, that he has not left you nor forsaken you. And you build actual temporary dwellings outside of your own home to stay in for a week long to celebrate around other people. You bring your community together to get under a temporary dwelling place in order to experience and remember together how God has provided for you. How beautiful is that? Let's celebrate that. Instead,

29:16 we move from thing to thing to thing. So I just, I love these seven feasts that God deliberately built into the Hebrew calendar, into the biblical calendar.

29:28 For joy, for remembrance, for celebration. And so I.

29:33 Wanted to land there today. I'm going to close this episode out by just setting it up for us. Next week, what I would love to do is dive into what are some practical ways that we can take what this looks like in the biblical calendar? What are some ways that we can look at John 15 and what does it mean to abide in Christ?

29:54 What are ways that we.

29:55 Can look at from a neurobiological perspective and showing up in prayer with God, making a request known to him with thanksgiving? What is true gratitude practices? What do true gratitude practices look like? I want to get super practical next week. So this week, I just really wanted to lay the foundation and just set the stage by asking the question, when do you delight in others? When are you delighted in? When do you feel delighted in? And what are the rhythms in your life that bring delight and celebration and remembrance for you? How is your calendar discipling you as it relates to joy? And are you allowing joy to be a metric of success or are you just simply hoping it becomes a byproduct of it?

30:47 As we close today, I just want to leave you with those questions. And the other thing I would love to do is just remind you, check out the show notes today for the various resources that I talked about in here. The other half of church, also the Living Legacy cohort and the coaching that's coming up. You can also check out Tender and Fierce and all the coaching that we have through Famous at Home. And 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

31:29 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.

31:39 Keep in mind that the

31:39 Greatest red carpet you will ever walk is through your front door.