Remember, God loves you, wants you to be happy

Happy first birthday, Andy! I know Grandma and I gave you a present at your birthday party, but you will soon outgrow it and will no doubt forget it. So as I have written to Katie and Claire before you, I wanted to offer my heart and my hope for you in a letter just for you.

At this very moment, as you begin your second year of life, you already are a most valued and loved member of our family. And you are also a most valued and loved child of God. That’s what I want to tell you about today.

You will not read this for a number of years yet, and it may be even longer before you understand some of the things I write about. But that’s OK. For my thoughts to have any long-lasting value for you, you will need to come back to this letter as you grow in your own God-given wisdom.

Taped to my computer screen is an outrageous and wonderful picture of you I took on your first birthday weekend. You are standing up in the bathtub, your beautiful and plentiful black hair wet against your head. You love being in the water, so your mouth and eyes are exploding with joy!

It is your straight-out joy in that moment that I hope you will never forget deep down in the corners of your soul, Andy. When I look at this picture of you, I am so quickly reminded of how I am sure God wants us to experience life every day.

As you play in water wherever you find it for the rest of your life, I want you to think of God’s absolute love of you. Know you can enjoy life because God has given you the boundless joy found in a single moment of playing in the water.

Relive that joy easily, precious grandson, because you will have many times when joy is hard to find.

By the time you can understand this letter, you will have had many disappointments. I hope most of them will be very small ones, even if you may not think so at the time. There will be many times in your growing years when you will feel many hurtful things, so joy will be the last thing you want to feel.

Well, that’s all right, because “joy” isn’t only a feeling that bubbles up inside of you. Joy is really less a feeling and more an attitude you have to claim as your own. Right now, you only know feelings, good and bad feelings. But joy doesn’t begin in your feelings. Joy really begins in the soul God gave you as you grew inside of your mommy.

Many people who think a lot about God believe that all people are born as “sinners.” That means they believe people are born with a natural urge to fight against God’s desires for us to love one another.

Well, Andy, your grampa thinks about God a lot, too. And he joins with a lot of other people who believe God made us all to be “blessings” to each other. That means that in spite of our foolish urges to fight each other and do really stupid things that hurt other people and God, deep down, God gave us the power to be joyful and loving.

One of the very special things I read is The Joyful Noiseletter. It is a small newspaper I’ve received every month for almost 20 years. Every time I laugh at its jokes, enjoy its cartoons and smile at the wisdom of laughter, I am reminded to rejoice. To “rejoice” is to come back to joy again. God wants us to return to joy again and again.

God’s basic desire for all people, even for the plants and animals and all living things in the world, is to be filled with joy. It is that special attitude deep in our souls that tells us life is so very good. But because God gave us all the brains to make our own choices, we can choose to be joyful or to be stingy with our lives.

Too many people choose to be stingy. I think it’s because they haven’t played in the water like you do. Or maybe they have just plain forgotten what it is to be filled with a moment of joy over the simplest act of giving yourself to something beyond yourself.

Sometimes, Andy, I suspect that when some people smile and seem happy or even joyful, they may really only be relieved. That’s a word that means some kind of fear is gone out of their hearts. Relief is a very good feeling to have, but it isn’t the same thing as joy.

Relief happens because something bad first happened in a person’s life, or that person is afraid something bad will happen. When the bad thing stops, or it doesn’t really happen, a person will feel relief. But he may not feel joy.

Joy happens because something really good has happened. It may be a splash in a tidal pool on the Oregon Coast like you had last week. Or it may be the joy your grandma and I feel when we see you and your sisters, your daddy and mommy. Or it may be all kinds of things that remind us that life was created by God to be very good.

You may be embarrassed on your 10th birthday if I show you what you looked like in the bathtub. But believe me, Andy, you look like God’s best expression of joy. And there is nothing that looks better to anyone than that. I enjoy you so very much!