Joy

There’s this quote by Mother Theresa that I absolutely love. It is,

Joy is strength, joy is prayer, joy is love, a net of love with which you can catch souls.

At first, it felt like a beautiful saying, something to admire from a distance; beautiful, almost poetic, but not something I could fully grasp. Joy had always seemed to me like a passing feeling, fragile, something that came and went depending on how kind or cruel the day decided to be. But only now am I beginning to embrace the truth behind her words.

Joy is more than just a fleeting feeling, it is a way of being. It is a curious thing that rarely announces itself. Instead, it arrives quietly, slipping into our ordinary life, like sunlight through the gap of the curtains on a window, warming a room without demanding attention.

As children, joy was simple and effortless. It lived in the small details: playing in the rain till our clothes clung to our body, getting a lot of sweets and chocolates, running around the compound barefooted. It was in the way my dad’s laughter echoed throughout the house, or how my sisters and I made doll houses from paper and old school books and created entire worlds from scraps of imagination. It was in abundance because i didn’t question it; I simply received it.

But growing older, joy became something more difficult to find. Life unfolded, carrying with it both sorrows and numerous responsibilities. I began to see that joy isn’t always loud or obvious. Sometimes it hides in plain sight (a shared joke in the middle of a tiresome day, seeing/hearing something funny and catching the eyes of a friend who shares the joke and makes it 10x funnier, the comfort of knowing someone thought of me). There is joy in the chaos of family gatherings, where conversations overlap and laughter spills into the night. And there is joy in solitude too, in the quietness of the evening when the sky is painted with colors.

It is no longer something I can simply receive passively; joy has become something I must choose, again and again, in every situation.

Mother Teresa was right: joy is strength. It carries us when we are weary, when sorrow presses heavy on our chest. Joy doesn’t erase pain, but it gives us the courage and strength to keep going. Joy is also prayer, because it lifts the heart without words, turning gratitude into something more sacred. And joy is love because when we allow ourselves to live in joy, we make space for others to feel it too.

The older I get, the more I realize that joy is not about perfection. It doesn’t wait for everything to be in place. It shows up right in the middle of our messiness. Perhaps that is what makes it holy. Perhaps that is what makes it a net of love, capable of catching souls, not because it shouts, but because it whispers in the middle of an unrestrained laughter or a wide smile: life is still good, and you are still loved__.

There is, of course, a deeper joy I am slowly learning about, the kind that is not dependent on any circumstance, the kind that lingers even when life feels unsteady. It is quieter than laughter and excitement, but it endures. Maybe it is rooted in God, or maybe it is God Himself, hidden in the spaces where my heart finally remembers that I am loved, no matter what.

When I think of joy now, I picture it like music. Sometimes it is loud and impossible to ignore, sometimes it is a faint harmony in the background, but always it is there, waiting to be noticed. And I wonder if part of living is learning how to listen for it, even in the noise of the world.

Joy to me is proof. Proof that God has written beauty into existence in a way that cannot be undone. Proof that even in mystery, even in hardship, there will always be light breaking through.