Putting Joy Into Practice Quotes

“To me, this translates today to avoiding exhausting myself with the preparation of a fancy and expensive feast. A simple meal, warmly offered, is enough.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“Perhaps there are many professionals who move to your area for work, away from their hometowns and their families. I remember being one of those myself, when I took a job in Washington, D.C., after college in New York. As I tried to navigate the new world of adulthood and independence, the excitement of a new job and a new city, I cried every night for the first two weeks. The nightly tears subsided through the hospitality of others, some young professionals like myself, and others older, wiser, and happy to share their homes and their experiences with me.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“I did not want people to leave, but even when they did, I still felt joy.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“I have found that those instances of wanting to yell in anger are fewer and farther between when I am intentional about daily praying arrow prayers.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“I remember Madeleine L’Engle exclaiming in a creative writing class I took with her, “Why couldn’t they just give them some oil!” For the longest time I asked myself the same question, notwithstanding the fact that this was a parable rather than a historical event. I found my answer in the words of St. Seraphim of Sarov. The oil was the Holy Spirit, and the wise virgins had “acquired the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is everywhere and fills all, but only those who have acquired it can let their lamps shine brightly to receive the bridegroom. When we ask the Holy Spirit to dwell within us, it is God’s gift to give, not ours.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“Simon, Christ’s host, protests that this woman touching him is a sinner, and Christ explains to him that the one who has been forgiven less loves less, but the one who has been forgiven more loves more.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“Mother Erene of Blessed Memory once shared this story about a monk known as “the one with a needle and thread”: Whenever this monk saw one of his brothers [the other monks] with torn clothes, he would sew them. This was his main occupation. When he grew older, having struggled and about to depart the world, he told them, “I want the key to the door of Paradise.” The monks brought him the icon of our Lord Jesus Christ. He was happy to see it and embraced it. But he said again, “I want the key to the door of Paradise.” So they brought him the icon of the Virgin, the Mother of God. He was happy to see and embraced it. But once more, he said, “I want the key to the door of Paradise.” One of the monks said, “Bring him a needle and thread.” They did. So, he was very happy and told them, “These are the keys to the door of Paradise.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“However, making time for such things has been shown to increase the available time we have for the things we want to do, not just the things we have to do. Time management experts point to this reality all the time. Once we recognize that we have more time, we start to see the space open up before us to engage in the other practices that help us experience joy—opening our doors to others in hospitality, visiting the sick, and gathering with the believers to sing praise to God. I cannot see any wiser investment of time than in investing it in those practices that help us give and receive sacrificial love—to help us live in joy.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“Sometimes, however, counting our blessings might give us a sense that we have more favor with God than others and lead us to judge people who have less than we do as having less favor with God. But anyone who has seen the simple joy and happiness expressed on the faces of people who have so much less material wealth than we in developed countries do can attest to the fact that our excess wealth might very well be stealing our joy.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“In addition, sometimes publicly counting our blessings can cause inadvertent pain to others. We no more deserve our blessings than others deserve their pain. In a recent essay on Motherwell, Liz Becker writes: When we say we are blessed, when we refer to our marriages or pregnancies or children in this way, we say, whether intentionally or not, that we have been arbitrarily chosen for joy, and that all of the suffering in the world has been chosen as well. Every hashtag, every smiling angel emoji, is another tiny arrow aimed at the person who does not have these things, the couple who just failed a third round of IVF, the woman going through her fifth miscarriage, the single man or woman who has struggled through yet another breakup, the parents who have buried a child.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“Perhaps we should reconsider how we count our blessings publicly. Perhaps, while celebrating the birth of a child, we might quietly offer a prayer for a friend who is suffering from infertility or infant loss. Perhaps, as we celebrate a new engagement or a wedding, we also might pray for our single friends and find a way to ensure their inclusion in our communities. Perhaps, instead of using our phones to Instagram a sumptuous meal, we might use them for an online donation to a local food bank.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“And so the virtuous cycle continues—in giving, we realize how much we have, so we offer thanks, and in offering thanks, we think about how much we can give.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“How then, do we cultivate the attitude of gratitude that leads to joy in God? In addition to weekly participation in the Eucharist, we can give thanks in our daily prayers. When we kneel to pray our personal petitions, we can start a habit of beginning them with thanksgiving, even if just thanks that we are able to turn to God and pray at that moment. Praying the Hours, as we have already discussed, gives us a guide. The Thanksgiving Prayer is prayed before each of the seven Hours, and every Hour ends with an absolution containing a different prayer of thanks—a recipe for constant thanksgiving. Just by praying the morning and evening hours, we have started and ended our days with thanks.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church

“Let us do so by thanking God instead for his creation and his wondrous works. We don’t need to travel to see them; many of these works are right outside our windows in the dramatic color-changing leaves of fall, or even right under our noses, in the sweet scent of our babies or the cuddles of our pets. We see them in the electric wires that power our homes and workplaces—or in the palms of our hands, in the phones that put the world at our fingertips and keep us in touch with the ones we love. Have we thought about thanking God for the inventors that made this possible for us? All of these God has made, and we thank him.”
― Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Putting Joy Into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church