Every year I ask God for a word to hold onto and to help guide my thoughts and my heart.  Each year, I am not entirely in love with the word that I am given.  However, by the end of the year, I see all that my one little word has taught me and revealed to me.

This year, my word is delight and once again I am not especially in love with my word.  I have recently gone back to therapy because delight, happiness, and joy are things that don’t come naturally to me.  I can be all these things in moments and in my head, but I don’t experience them nor fully allow myself to swim in them.   While God giving me the word delight does bring comfort that I am in the right direction, it also scares me a little.

While sulking in the displeasure of my word, my Comforter gently asked me to go see my tree.  You see, I have this tree, a Japanese Magnolia, that blooms these beautiful flowers right in the middle of the winter.  I love my tree.  It reminds me to hope when things look dark and that beauty can be found in the winters of our lives.  Last year, I was too sick to photograph it as much as I would have liked.  The year before, my tree hadn’t bloomed at all.  As I walked out to my tree, I saw so many buds ready to bloom.  My tree is covered in blooms!

Delight! There it was.  I was standing in my front yard, in my pajamas, experiencing delight.  And that is when it hit me- delight isn’t an emotion that always comes alone.  It is a companion emotion.   When a baby smiles we feel comfort and delight.  When a friend laughs their loud boisterous laugh, we feel joy and delight.  When we are held in the arms of our lover, we feel love and delight.  When our God reminds us that He sees us and knows us, we feel hope and delight.

So with anticipation and a little nervousness, my word for this year is delight. May I learn to experience it from my head to my toes.