By Gabrielle Ekhator

Imagine someone buys you your dream car. It’s a pink Lamborghini for me. I know that if someone buys me a pink Lamborghini, I might just owe my life to the person. And if you know me, anything with the color pink will literally make me fall in love with you even though we fought in elementary school, we had bad blood in high school, or we were always in a form of competition in college. Whatever the scenario may be, you will have my heart and you will have it whole. 

Okay enough about me now.  For real, I just want you to imagine that. Imagine how your emotions of happiness will overtake your expressions to show how thankful you are. Imagine the unconditional love you feel from that person. Be it your boyfriend (my good sis, you better get his last name), be it your dad (you already have his last name so just be on your best behavior ’til death) , or be it your best friend (I hope you know you owe him/her every boy/girl advice in this world). 

I’m sure no one will take a free car for granted. Here’s the catch, if our emotions can overtake our expressions, we get so happy that we don’t know how to act. We admire and love the person much more than we did before they blessed us. If happiness can make us feel like that, what about how joy would make us feel? We might even go out of our way to please the person.

You might have been hearing a lot about joy in these past weeks. You might really know how joy feels. You may have really never felt joy.  I believe there’s a clear difference in knowing the feeling and acting the feeling. Tapping into the joy God set before us goes beyond just being happy or joyful. We will make the decision to owe him our life, to love him forever for he has given us our heart desires. This is an unconditional emotion that will overtake your expression. It will overtake your expression to love Him, it will overtake your expression to please Him, it will overtake your expression to show people the coolness of being loved by the Highest and will make us act in ways that we don’t understand but glorifies God.

Let this be your friendly reminder to tap into that joy, that constant feeling that overtakes and overflows. It will help when the days and nights are long, when there seems to be no hope, and when you’re so overwhelmed and stressed that it impacts your daily capacities. 

Can I just say, my week has been so rough that the only thing that really made me get by, is that joyful feeling? It felt so good that I think I forgot how stressful my situation was. God loves us!