Joy
Finding Joy Again After Loss
Once again, my heart was shattered into a million pieces. I barely noticed the gorgeous weather as I sat alone on our front porch steps, tears streaming down my face. My husband was still at work, but I needed to step away from our three young children as I wept over the devastating phone call I had just received. “Mrs. Mullett, the pathology report came back. The tumor we removed from your son is cancerous. We’re sending this on to his transplant team, and you will hear back from them on next steps.” I felt physically ill as I thought about how to break the news to our six-year-old cancer survivor. Austin had just completed one year of aggressive chemotherapy and was just beginning to enjoy life again, despite the lingering effects of his toxic medications. Compounded Loss I r...
Fighting for Moments of Joy and Hope
On the Jesus Calling® Podcast, author Dawn Barton shared how she’d lost a child, survived rape, beaten Stage 3 breast cancer but lost her sister to the disease just a few years later, watched her mother suffer through a brain aneurysm, and walked her husband through the depths of alcoholism on the hard journey to sobriety. Dawn has every excuse in the world not to be joyful. But in this excerpt from her new book Laughing Through the Ugly Cry: And Finding Unstoppable Joy, Dawn shows us why she has made it, as she says, a goal to “scream from the mountaintops why we should be joyful, and why it’s a choice.” A DEEP BREATH AND a huge, slow eye roll. That was my immediate reaction. A family member had just said to me, “You get to.” This was her attempt at reminding me of the holiest of pos...
