It’s me. Hi. I’m back from the abyss, it’s me.
Okay, it wasn’t really an abyss. More like a vortex. A vortex of moving and a last minute transition for our kids from full-time homeschool to a university-model school.

I’ve meant to sit down and write a hundred times the last few months. What’s stopped me? Boxes. Boxes upon boxes. Boxes stacked up in my home and what has felt like boxes stacked up in my brain.

I remember the last time I was pregnant that I felt I couldn’t write. The baby being woven together inside me seemed to suck out my energy as well as my creative juices. A vocabulary word definition I memorized in high school kept circulating through my mind. “Stupidly empty of ideas.” That’s exactly how I felt then and how I have felt the last few months. I’ve had a mind that is stupidly empty and yet, overflowing at the same time. This time, I haven’t been growing a baby, just settling back into our home, the nesting urge taking over and consuming me in similar ways as it did in pregnancy.

It’s been almost one year since our house fire. When people have expressed a lot of sympathy and compassion for us, my first instinct has been to downplay it. On the scale of trials, it seemed like I didn’t really have that much to complain about. “It could be a lot worse,” I’d say. “We’re fine.” “The silver lining is getting to renovate.” All of that is certainly true.

Yet, there have been plenty of moments, particularly since we moved back in, that I’ve been reminded that this has indeed been a trial. Mostly on the front and end and back end, the upheaval to our lives has been quite overwhelming. I will tell you, dear reader, when the movers began unloading and filling my garage with boxes and boxes of random stuff that had been in storage for ten months just as I had begun to feel like I’d started to manage the boxes we’d already had moved, I very nearly burst into tears. There is nothing quite like sorting through the refuse of your life in one hundred degree weather.

Does the Holy Spirit ever give you a verse and your first reaction is, “No, not that one. Pass. Try again.” That’s what happened as I tried to suppress overwhelm-induced meltdown. This time, it was the familiar verse in James, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds…”

Some verses in some moments can feel like salt in the wound. Like “singing cheerful songs to a heavy heart” or just laughable. Nothing about my situation at that moment felt even close to joy. But here’s the thing. It doesn’t actually say it is joy. It says count it as joy.

When we budget in life, we count our money towards different categories. This much to groceries. This much to gas. In the budgeting of the kingdom, James says, you can count this trial towards joy. Not because it feels like joy, but because it will end in joy because of what it will produce: steadfastness. The command to count it as joy is not a command to feel joy. It’s a command to count it as an investment in our ultimate joy.

In other words, James is saying, “You can take this suffering to the bank.”

What’s more, we can be comforted to know God is counting it too. He is not a reckless accountant of our suffering. He is not flippantly hurling trials at us, but measuring them precisely, carefully counting them out to “make us perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” All things work for our good and oh how carefully are “all things” handled by a sovereign God who made us and gave himself up for us.

So, I guess I will take that verse after all, Holy Spirit. In the reckoning of the accounting of my life, I will mark it down. “One house fire, faith tested, steadfastness produced.” Put it in the joy column.

And I know many of you reading this also have your own “various trials,” your own aches and burdens it feels too much to ask to count as joy. I hope you’re reminded that God’s command are never trite, never insensitive to the realness of our hurts. He never asks us to count what he has not already guaranteed. Through the cross, we know he’s good at exchanging the heaviest griefs for the greatest joys. Even if your heart is heavy, even if it feels like sorrow, I hope you can look to the Lord and mark it down in faith: One more for the joy column.