Remember when you were a child and something made you so happy that you started spinning around with glee? You may have jumped, you may have danced with joy, but you couldn’t keep still! So my question is, what holds us back from demonstrating such a joyful spirit as this as we grow older?

There’s an old Hebrew word for joy that suggests maybe we shouldn’t stop experiencing such joyful emotion like that. It’s the word “giyl” (pron. gheel) or “guwl” (pron. gool) and it means to find so much joy that you spin around with wild emotion! Interesting etymology, perhaps it’s where we get the word: “glee”. It is the word used for “joy” in Habakkuk 3:18 – “I will joy in the God of my salvation.” When was the last time you spun around with pure joy like this? Has it been a while, a long while?

Here’s the kicker: this kind of pure joy, in the context of this scripture, was expressed even when things weren’t going well. I’ll talk more about this in another post, but suffice it to say, you can choose joy, feel joy, and know joy, enough to spin about, regardless of circumstances. Wow. That kind of joy only comes from God.

When you experience joy like this, what others think really doesn’t matter. We know that King David exuberantly danced for joy, and may have even spun about, at the return of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. So much so, his wife mocked him, but he didn’t care. You see, such joy frees your spirit.

Like the release of a dove to fly, when you really grasp the joy that God gives, you want to spread your wings too. You feel the freedom to show your joy back to Him with pure abandon. The norms of society, of course, have taught us to restrain ourselves from showing too much emotion, but God does not. He doesn’t tell us to button it up. Even if you don’t feel as if you could spin around with joy in public, you might want to in the privacy of your own home. Why not? Break the rules! Experience the full joy of the Lord and the joy of a little child again. It’s not childish, it’s child-like, and there’s a significant difference. Jesus said: “Unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Although in this instance He was referring to humility and faith in our Father, we have it on good authority that some child-like attributes are good, even essential for us to adopt.

So the next time you think on the absolute goodness of God and let His joy flood your soul and spirit, let yourself have the freedom to dance before Him, even jump or spin around with glee again! (Okay, be careful not to fall.) Watch what it does for your emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being.

Let your Father know how much you find joy in Him! He would be delighted in your pure and unadulterated happiness and joy. He’s like that.