I have longed to write something about the path of joy for a very long time.

But I have a confession to make.

For most of my life, when I thought about joy, what I was really picturing was happiness. Lighthearted. Easy. Life as a breeze, with the wind at my back and nothing too heavy weighing me down. I thought joy meant things going well.

And then I sat down at my kitchen table to prepare for a women’s retreat on the Beatitudes, verses I was certain I already knew. But God gently, completely rearranged everything I thought I understood.

Joy was never about life being easy.

It was about this entire upside down path we have just walked together.

Let’s look back for a moment, because I don’t think we can fully appreciate where we have arrived without remembering where we started.

We began with empty hands. Poor in spirit. Admitting we cannot hold it all together no matter how hard we try, and discovering that surrender, not striving, is where the Kingdom of Heaven begins.

We mourned. We let our sin and our brokenness bring us low enough to be met by the Comforter himself, and we found that joy does not skip over our grief. It moves through it.

We wrestled with meekness, discovering that strength surrendered to the right hands is not weakness at all, but the very thing that inherits the earth.

We hungered and thirsted for righteousness, learning that the deepest ache in us was never meant to be satisfied by anything less than God himself.

We extended mercy to people who did not deserve it, and discovered the astonishing truth that showing mercy frees the one who gives it every bit as much as the one who receives it.

We examined our divided hearts and asked God to make them pure, single-minded, fully His — and found the breathtaking promise that we would see Him. Not someday. Now. In the middle of everything.

We learned the difference between keeping peace and making it, and discovered that walking toward the hard conversation, at personal cost, is what it means to be called a child of God.

We faced the quiet, lonely reality of persecution, and found that we were never walking that road alone, because Jesus walked it first, and the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to us on both ends of this path.

And finally we were sent out as salt and light, charged to live all of this out loud in a world that desperately needs the flavor and the glow of a life surrendered to Christ.

That is the path. Every single step of it.

And here is what I know now that I did not know when I sat down at my kitchen table that day.

Joy was never waiting for us at the top of an easy mountain. It was woven into every single step of this harder, lower, more honest path. Joy was in the surrender. Joy was in the mourning. Joy was in the mercy we were brave enough to give away. Joy was even in the loneliness of persecution, because the Kingdom cannot be taken from us no matter what the world tries to take instead.

This is the upside down truth Jesus has been teaching us all along. The world chases happiness in all the places joy will never be found. Jesus leads us instead through the very places we would have avoided, and meets us there with something the world cannot manufacture and cannot take away.

Moses understood this. After God delivered Israel through the Red Sea, after the impossible became possible right before their eyes, he sang out, “The Lord is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation.” Exodus 15:2 (NIV)

Strength and song. Not strength or song. Both, together, inseparable.

That is what has carried me through every season of my own life, dear friend. Not my own ability to hold things together. Not my own cheerfulness or positive thinking. The Lord himself, becoming my strength when I had none left, and becoming my song when I did not know what else to sing.

That is the heart behind everything I have written about Psalm 71 and the song He gives us to carry through every season of life. He is not just the one who rescues us when the season is hard. He is the song we sing while we are still in the middle of it, before the rescue has even fully come.

Joy is not the absence of hard seasons. Joy is knowing whose strength is holding you and whose song is rising up in you even now.

We have been poured low and lifted up. We have wept and been comforted. We have surrendered and been filled. We have walked toward hard things and discovered we were never walking them alone. And now we stand here, salt and light, sent out into a world that needs exactly what this path has built into us.

My dear friend, as we close this journey together, please remember this:

May you walk in the joy of empty hands held open before your Father. May you find comfort in your mourning and mercy enough to give away. May your heart stay undivided and your peace cost you something worth paying. May you never walk alone, even when the world pushes back. May you be salt that flavors and light that cannot be hidden.

And may the Lord be your strength and your song, today and in every season still to come.

This has been the upside down path to joy.

I pray you have found, as I have, that it was worth every single step.

Looking back over these twelve weeks, which Beatitude met you most personally? What has changed in you since you started this journey? And where is God inviting you to keep walking, even after this series ends?