Joyful, Anyway (Lessons from Kate Bowler)
Joyful Anyway – Lessons from Kate Bowler
Psalm 126, John 15:9-12, II Timothy 1:4
May 17, 2026
Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney, First Presbyterian Church, San Rafael, CA
When the Holy One restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations, "God has done great things for them."
God has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.
Restore our fortunes like the watercourses in the Negeb.
May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves. Psalm 126
As Abba has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,
just as I have kept Abba’s commandments and abide in this love.
I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you,
and that your joy may be complete.
"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. John 15:9-12
Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. II Timothy 1:4
What is joy? Kate Bowler, author, speaker and Professor of Religious History at Duke University has been thinking about this question and doing various kinds of research. She recently published a new book Joyful Anyway. In one chapter, she tells the reader that she asked a group of kids - What is joy? Here are some of their responses:
Mara age 4 Joy makes everything yellow and happy
Henry age 4 Joy is safe-ing, like Batman when he is safe-ing people
Hana age 5 It’s when we feel happy and excited. Like seeing a polar bear and a penguin
Juniper age 6 Joy is excitement
Oliver age 4 When everyone I love is around me
John age 9 Happiness in your heart that can only come from God.
Max age 8 Like a bursting feeling. (pg. 170)
There is some wisdom there. Bowler is a person who is writing about joy from a authentic deep place. She is rooted in the Mennonite Christian household. Drawing on her experience of being diagnosed with stage 4 life threatening cancer at age 35, she writes about her life with authenticity and honesty. She looks at how our culture tends chase happiness. And it begins with an ache.
The Ache (excerpts from Part 1 pg. 11 – 70)
Kate Bowler describes "the ache" as a profound, persistent sense of longing, incompleteness, at the core of human existence. It is the universal, emotional pain caused by grief, unmet desires, and the realization that life is often fragile and uncontrolled, rather than a personal failure or temporary phase to be solved. It is a spiritual ache.
Key aspects of how she defines the ache include:
• A Universal Human Condition: It is not a "glitch in the programming" but a fundamental part of being alive, often described as a "bittersweet longing".
• A Desire that is hard to name : It is a deep, often physically felt desire for what is
missing—whether that is health, a person, or a life without regret.
• Feeling of grief - It is the feeling of grieving without a funeral, carrying the weight of loss and limitation into daily life.
She looks at the different aspects of this ache and longing. Too often we tend to chase happiness as a way to fix or resolve this ache.
Joy is Not Happiness
Happiness is conditional—it depends on things going right. Joy is sturdier. It is a "different kind of joy" that shows up despite the circumstances, not because they are good. It is the quiet, stubborn recognition that life is still worth loving, even when it is fragile and filled with sorrow.
Our passages invite us to see a kind of joy that is rooted in spiritual practices and community.
Psalm 126 is one of the Songs of Ascent, meaning literally “Songs of Going Up.” These are songs of going up to meet God. It was likely written when Israelites returned to Jerusalem after the exile in Babylon. The psalm was used whenever people came back on pilgrimage went up to Jerusalem and the temple. It is a psalm of preparation and anticipation. It speaks of restoration. What happened in the past is past, and now God is doing a new thing on behalf of the people. The psalm is both memory and future hope. It stands in a place of waiting. We know that Easter comes every year, but what will be the content of the shouts of joy we are waiting to say? How will God restore us? Planting seeds of joy while weeping.
In John’s gospel, John 15, Jesus tells his disciples that by loving one another, they will carry this love forward in their own loss and grief ahead. It is the love that they have for each other that will get them through. The community of the disciples is commanded abide in Christ’s love, to do works of love, but loving one another makes possible loving the world God loves. God cannot love the world without the love they take into the world. And they will do this embodied love together, just as Jesus has embodied limitless love. The word for joy here comes from root chairo and its forms appear seventy-four times in the New Testament. The word consistently reflects gladness rooted in God’s gracious activity. Scripture envisions a community where joys and sorrows are shared.
II Timothy – a letter from Paul to Timothy, another person preaching and on a mission to share the gospel and news of Christ. Encouraging him. This work, calling is hard. Sorrow and joy.
Bowler writes about The Myth of the Fixed Life
We live in a culture that promises that if we work hard enough, fix enough things, or have enough faith, life will be perfect. Bowler, a stage-four cancer survivor, challenges this mentality. She suggests our lives are often more complicated than we were promised, filled with uncertainty, loss. The first step to joy is dropping the pressure to "fix" or "optimize" our lives.
The book is structured as a series of reflections rather than traditional narrative chapters, focusing on actionable perspectives for finding joy:
Reject the Fix-it Trap : Joy does not require things to get better, nor is it a reward for fixing your life. It is about embracing the "tender" reality of a life that may never match the one imagined.
Rejecting Toxic Positivity: It argues against the pressure to optimize happiness, asserting that resilience comes from experiencing appropriate emotions, not forced optimism. Internal reality. Not performing or pretending we are fine and happy.
The Intersection of Joy and Grief: It highlights that joy is not "instead of" sadness, but often exists "with" it, providing a deeper sense of love and purpose. Co-existence. Not a volume control.
Make room for joy – be willing to make room. Not taking up all of our mind or energy or time. A sturdy kind of joy that remains even when life feels incomplete.
Letting go of control
Staying open to surprise and novelty
Choosing kindness and connection
Pay attention to micro-joys
When we are curious about joy and how that looks in daily life, we also acknowledge the very challenging times we are living in.
As Bowler writes in an article –
We feel slightly terrified. Deeply alarmed.
It’s a strange thing to carry so much grief and… still make dinner. Still laugh. Still love people fiercely.
Like you, I’m angry, sad, and worn thin by all the things I can’t fix. I’m watching the news and feeling the familiar churn of helplessness: immigrants targeted and terrified, fear and hatred dressed up as righteousness, the rise of unchecked autocracy.
And still—somehow—we show up to work. We make plans with friends. We put our bodies into chairs and planes and grocery lines. We keep going, even as the ache settles deeper into our bones.
What does it look like to maintain hope and kindness in a world that keeps daring us not to? It’s the question I’ve been chewing over as I feel such dis-ease and despair.
We choose to be open to joy not because danger isn’t real—but because fear does not get to decide what makes us human.
We are relearning the hard way: that waiting for safety before we live is a losing strategy.
We realize this is meant to wake us up—to call us back to lives rooted in love, responsibility, and truth, even when outcomes are uncertain.
The task of faith in frightening times was not to escape the ache, but to find our own way of living with it.
To keep making dinner and sharing meals.
To keep loving people fiercely.
To keep telling the truth about what hurts without surrendering our capacity for joy.
The world may be on fire – breaking and breaking open —but this, too, is where God meets us. Awake now. Paying attention. Still choosing what is human.
It feels lonely to know so much and still not know what to do.
It feels impossible to live with a heart cracked wide open in a world that rewards speed and numbness and detachment. And yet we must.
And so we keep choosing tenderness, even when it costs us something.
We keep choosing courage and kindness.
We keep doing the next small, ordinary right thing. Planting seeds of joy.
We work out our hope like it is a muscle, not a mood.
And this is how we find joy —together.
Amen.
Resources
Kate Bowler, “Living with the Ache,” Feb. 4, 2026 Substack - Everything Happens with Kate Bowler https://katebowler.substack.com/p/living-with-the-ache
Joyful, Anyway The Dial Press, 2026.