July: Joy That Does Not Depend on the Weather

July is a month that promises happiness and does not always deliver it. The days are long and the calendar is full. There are cookouts and fireworks and trips, and there are also heat, travel delays, family tension, and the particular loneliness of a season when everyone else seems to be having a better time. It is the right month to think carefully about joy, because it is the month most likely to confuse joy with good circumstances.

So the spiritual focus for July is joy, and the teacher is Paul, writing to the Philippians. The word joy or rejoice appears in that short letter more than a dozen times, and Paul wrote it in chains, uncertain whether he would live. He was not describing a mood he happened to be in. He was describing something he had found, and he wanted the Philippians to find it too. In chapter four he commands it: rejoice in the Lord always, and then he repeats himself, in case they thought he had misspoken.

Notice the phrase in the Lord. Paul does not say rejoice in your circumstances, or rejoice when things go well, or rejoice because it is summer. He says rejoice in the Lord. The joy has an object, and the object does not change with the weather. This is the whole secret of the letter. Paul could rejoice in prison because the thing he was rejoicing in was not affected by prison. Christ was still Christ. The gospel was still advancing. The Philippians were still his partners. The day of Christ was still coming.

That kind of joy is different from cheerfulness. Cheerfulness is a temperament, and some people are born with more of it. Joy in the Lord is available to the melancholy and the anxious as much as to the sunny, because it is not produced by personality but by attention. It comes from looking at something true and letting the gladness follow. Paul's letter is full of things to look at: Christ who emptied himself and was exalted, a righteousness that is not our own, a citizenship in heaven, a God who supplies every need.

Through July, then, here is the practice. Each day, before anything else, name one thing that is true of Christ and would still be true if today went badly. Say it out loud if you can. Then go into the day. When the circumstances turn, and some days they will, come back to the thing you named. This is not positive thinking. It is rejoicing in the Lord, which is a discipline of looking before it is a feeling of gladness.

Alongside that, watch for the enemies of joy Paul names. Grumbling and arguing, in chapter two, which dim the light. Selfish ambition and vain conceit, which set people against each other. Anxiety, in chapter four, which he answers with prayer and thanksgiving. Discontent, which he answers with the secret of being content in any and every situation. Each of these will show up in July, probably at a family gathering.

By the end of the month, the goal is not that you will have had a happy July. It is that you will have learned, in the heat and the noise and the occasional disappointment, to rejoice in something that was not the weather. That is a skill that will serve you long after summer ends.