Be Still And Know

Ecclesiastes 9:7 NLT 'So go ahead. Eat your food with joy, and drink your wine with a happy heart, for God approves of this!' My favourite dictionary defines joy as “the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires”. Scripture tells us that “the joy of the Lord is [our] strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). Life has a habit of crushing the joy out of us. Once our joy is gone we, like a squeezed lemon, are reduced to an empty skin. Our substance has gone; our principal ingredient lost. Recently I discovered an online tool (thejoyprinciple.net) that promised to measure my joy. It was simple and immediate, as any online experience must be. It measured more than 16 yes/no questions where I perceived my state of happiness with family, friends, the world around me, and finally my possessions. I scored 95 per cent joyful. Not bad, the average being 68 per cent. I was encouraged since I had set the parameters high on family, low on friendship, medium on the world aroun