Finding delight in all the wrong places | Clergy

I turned 50 last month and imagined arriving at this threshold with some kind of ritual — something like a jubilee to mark the crossing. I pictured candles and careful words, a journal filled with insight, a practice that would feel deep and luminous and life-giving. I tried a few times, sitting down with a good pen, a warm cup of tea, some music playing low in the background, hoping something meaningful would emerge. But the more I tried to manufacture the moment, the more it slipped away. I had been looking for something grand. Something impressive. Something that might shake me awake and change my life. But it turns out the change I was hoping for was much smaller: practicing delight.

So that’s what I did. Starting on my birthday, I began writing one prayer each day, and these are not polished or pious prayers. They are authentic, addressed to the God of Saturdays, sweaters and soup. What I’m practicing is a kind of turning — a repentance, if you will — away from what prayer is supposed to sound like, and toward what it might feel like to simply give (not pay) attention.

What I have been discovering is the ability to notice gifts. Not the large, obvious birthday ones, but the small and persistent ones that arrive without announcement. A cheeseburger that tastes better than it has any right to. A song that catches me off guard. The audacity of a flower beginning to open, even in winter’s relentless grip. I even found myself writing a prayer of delight about plunging a stubborn toilet — not because the task itself was particularly inspiring, but because of the laughter that flowed freely among coworkers who shared the moment. Even that, it turns out, can be a kind of gift.

And that’s what I want to offer you, Dear Reader. Not a clogged toilet, of course. But the invitation to discover joy right in your daily, ordinary life. We tend to think of joy as something reserved for the big moments, like Easter Sunday, when everything lines up, when circumstances cooperate. And if we are honest, we struggle with wondering how joy is possible at all in a world heavy with grief and conflict.

As it turns out, joy doesn’t arrive once everything is fixed. It doesn’t wait for perfect conditions. Joy grows out of something much humbler: the practice of delight, which doesn’t deny the dust of life — the brokenness, the inconvenience, the sorrow. It doesn’t pretend those things aren’t real. But it refuses to let them have the final word. Delight is a quiet act of resistance. It is a choice to notice, to receive, to celebrate — even here.

In this very moment, Friend, your mind is receiving these little squiggles of letters and words and translating them into strings of thought and tapestries of meaning! How wild is that? Right now our lungs are processing oxygen, and our bodies are sharing a world with baboons and blue whales and blue jays, which are literally — and I am not making this up — blue! Can we imagine it, friends? Can we laugh with the wild ridiculousness of it, or at least feel the muscles in our faces turn upwards a bit? Can we notice the smell of toast? The way the sheets feel against our skin when we first crawl into bed, tired, after a day of being alive in this wonderful world, which is filled with dust and delight? What if we didn’t wait for some future moment to finally arrive, but started practicing the delight of receiving the small gifts of this abundant life?

So perhaps the invitation is not to wait. Not to hold out for a better moment, a bigger birthday, a more polished version of joy. Perhaps the invitation is simply to begin here: to notice the yellow flower next to the driveway, or the quiet satisfaction of shared laughter. To practice delight, right in the middle of the dust. And to discover, perhaps to our surprise, that it is already enough.

The Rev. Greg Milinovich, St. Paul’s United Methodist Church and Wesley Foundation in State College.