Reinke - The Joy Project: A True Story of Inescapable Happiness

Every morning we wake up with an unimpeachable dream to find joy. But sometimes that dream becomes a nightmare: self-secured joy is just a shadow. At the end of a restless day we look to the self-help gurus but they can only give us magnifying glasses to gaze more deeply into our own navels. Lift your sights through The Joy Project, and rejoice to read that joy is actually coming for you.

GLORIA FURMAN , author of Treasuring Christ When Your Hands Are Full

Our eyes of flesh seek joy in the wrong places, define it with a bankrupt vocabulary, and settle for it using mistaken formulas. Because we dont know what to do but try harder and hide our shame, we get stuck and sick, depressed and despondent. This dehumanizes us, discourages us, and defeats us. But there is hope! Read The Joy Project and you will see the Lords design in the Gospel to give you eyes of faith to behold that joy only comes through the electing, atoning, and comforting love of our Triune God. This is applied reformed theology at its best.

ROSARIA BUTTERFIELD, author of Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

We all want joy and happinessbut they seem such elusive things. We reach for them and fall, we aim and miss. For me thats because I make them dependent on me: how Im doing, how Im feeling. Tony Reinke shows a far sweeter way, a way to solid joy.

MICHAEL REEVES, author of Rejoicing in Christ

To our prayer and financial partners around the world
the joyful, generous, and beloved colaborers
behind everything we publish at desiringGod.org.

The Joy Project: A True Story of Inescapable Happiness

Copyright 2015 by Tony Reinke

Download this book in three digital formats, free of charge, at desiringGod.org

This book version: 1.8 (October, 2015)

Published by Desiring God

Post Office Box 2901

Minneapolis, MN 55402

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture taken from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author or editor.

ISBN: 978-0-9912776-5-0
Cover design: Christopher Tobias, Tobias Outerwear for Books
eBook design: Josh Pritchard, Gideon House Books
First printing 2015
Printed in the United States of America

Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him.
Isaiah 42:1

How much of your life is driven by the desire for joy?

Well, all of it. We know we need joy like we need food and water. How we get joy is something of a mystery, and most of us are content to leave that mystery unsolved. We simply want to experience the joy we desire.

Joy is real, but joy is also elusive. Just when we think weve got a handful of happiness, we watch it run through our fingers and vanish. Where does it go?

For many of us, this quest for joy leadswith terrible ironyto despair. We pursue joy in materialism, and we get stuck in debt. We pursue joy in our children, and gnaw ourselves with worry over their well-being. We pursue marital perfection, and grumble when we find our spouses faults.

We aim for joy, and we find doubt. Is joy Really so mysterious and circumstantial? Is joy poisoned? What if our desire for ultimate joy is really just a curse? What if the promise of all-satisfying joy is lifes cruelest hoax?

And yet, no matter how hard we are let down, and no matter how hard we fail, we cannot stop looking for joy. It drives us. We dont stopwe cant stop, we wont stop. So we turn to personal discipline and to how-to books, life hacks, and gimmicky life-organization tools, all thinking that our main problem must be a failure of focus.

We conclude that the barriers to abiding joy are the unhealthy choices that clog our lives. The root problem, we think, is that were stuck in a rut of predictability and laziness, so we must unstick ourselves. We turn to self-improvement. We make new resolutions. We scour the Internet for list-blogs that promise lasting change with easy effort. We buy productivity apps for our phones. We resolve to become more chill parents, sexier spouses, better friend-winners, and more purposeful people-influencers. We need to sit less and walk more. We need to sleep more and eat less. We need to get to the gym a few times a week to lose fat and build muscle. We purge fast food, drop the carbs, and fork down more vegetables. We drink more water, less coffee, less soda. We buy organic, fair trade, rBGH-free, gluten-free, free-range. We pay off credit card debt and build our savings. We clip coupons. We invest money in a new retirement plan. We set aside some funds for a future vacation. We clean out the garage. We purge our closets of junk. We buy apps to track our progress and planners to micromanage our days. We commit to staying on top of our e-mails, checking our phones less often, watching less television, visiting the library more, and reading our neglected stacks of books.

We chase a long list of changes to sharpen our daily routines, to tweak our daily habits, and to find our daily joy. Its no surprise that how-to books promising this high-powered life sell by the millions. One such guide is The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, the whimsically titled New York Times best seller by Gretchen Rubin.

In her book, and others like it, each step of personal discipline promises to bring a mounting list of small changes that snowball into a happy life. The lesson we learn from it all is what Rubin knows well: Increased joy rarely comes by accident. Most of our joy appears after strategic planning, goal setting, and self-discipline, oron some sweet occasions by a surprise gift from the planning and sacrifices of a spouse or friend. Sometimes joy is sporadic and surprises us out of nowhere. But usually it is the by-product of goals and planning.

The Project

Yes, joy does hinge on a plan (more on that in a moment). But the premise behind the promise of all this happiness is the problem. For Rubin and other writers, it all hinges on you: your structured resolutions, your renewed convictions, and your decisive discipline. The hitch with books like The Happiness Project is that personal joy gets thrown back on you: your initiative, your planning, your work, your determination. Happiness can be yours, but only if you earn it. For the go-getters, joy earned at the end of long lists and assignments may be good news. But most of us see these ploys as tedious and trivial, and we grow more depressed, more burdened, and more buried under the acute sense that, somewhere along the line, we flunked life.

If you are like me, you take stock of your disordered lifethe cluttered corners, the grubby margins of your days, and the unkempt middle where you do most of your livingand the result is painfully deflating. Rather than increasing your joy, all this introspection breeds regret and self-loathing.

What if all our focus on changing personal patterns misses a much bigger and more important point?

• What if joy goes deeper than the flimsy foundations of organized day planners, thinned-out closets, freshly painted walls, or a perfectly followed gym routine?
• What if joy is not found at the end of a to-do list?