Lenten Campaign 2025
This content is free of charge, as are all our articles.
Support us with a donation that is tax-deductible and enable us to continue to reach millions of readers.
Have you ever felt a joyous relief after a hard day's work? This could be through some physical act of labor, or simply through a productive day when you had to really expend yourself and push the limits of your intellectual capabilities.
While joy can certainly come to us without any work, we often feel the greatest amount of joy when it occurs when something is difficult.
One of the most obvious examples of this truth is the joy a mother typically feels after the birth of her child.
Joy after work
St. John Paul II reflected on this reality in an Angelus message for the Fourth Sunday of Lent in 1979:
Lent, more than any other period in the liturgical year, must be a time of commitment and spiritual effort. But precisely this effort, this toil, gives an occasion for joy. During Lent, the Church lives in the prospect of the joy of the Resurrection. The Sunday call to joy today also reminds us of this prospect; but the joy that comes from toil is even greater.
It would be more difficult to experience that kind of joy if everything were delivered to us on a silver platter. We may be satisfied, but we may not experience authentic joy.
St. John Paul II is trying to remind us of the simple fact that we need to put forth some effort into our spiritual life and to work hard to become holy.
He continues, "We feel this joy whenever we overcome our spiritual laziness, faint-heartedness, and indifference. We always feel joy when we see that we are capable of demanding something from ourselves; that we are capable of giving something of ourselves to God and to our neighbor. Real spiritual joy is the joy that springs from toil, from effort."
One example of spiritual joy is when a person experiences freedom from a particular sinful habit. It can be an amazing experience to no longer be enslaved to a particular sin that has been haunting you for years.
However, in order to arrive at that spiritual joy, it requires great effort, responding to God's bountiful grace.
The good news is that we are not alone in our spiritual journey. God is there at our side and can share in our pain and sorrow.
He wants us to experience joy, especially the joy we will all feel at the end of our lives on earth.
