Devotional: Joy dwells with God...

Joy belongs not only to those who have been called home, but also to the living, and no one shall take it from us....I don't mean by this something fabricated, compelled, but something given, free. Joy dwells with God; it descends from Him and seizes spirit, soul, and body, and where this joy has grasped a man it grows greater, carries him away, opens closed doors. There is a joy which knows nothing of sorrow, need, and anxiety of the heart; it has no duration, and it can only drug one for the moment. The joy of God has been through the poverty of the crib and distress of the cross; therefore it is insuperable, irrefutable. It does not deny the distress where it is, but finds God in the midst of it, indeed precisely there; it does not contest the most grievous sin, but finds forgiveness in just this way; it looks death in the face, yet finds life in death itself. ...Dietrich Bonhoeffer image