Audiobook Chapter 3: Joy -- The Face of Jesus That Transforms

Welcome to the other half of church podcast, a podcast at the intersection of brain science, theology and church life. With Michael Hendrix and Jim Wilder, we explore the brain God has given us and what we need for a healthy, transformational community of faith. Welcome to this special edition of the other half of church podcast, the audiobook for the other half of church just released and we want you to get a sneak peek. Over the next three weeks, we'll be dropping a chapter of the book into your podcast feed. So without further delay, here's the introduction in chapter one. You are listening to the other half of church, Christian community, brain science and overcoming spiritual stagnation, written by Michael Hendrix and Jim Wilder, narrated by Brian Conover. Chapter 3. Joy, the face of Jesus, the transforms. For God, who said, let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ. Second Corinthians 4, 6. When I first encountered Jesus in the middle of the night as a 19-year-old, I felt a mixture of hope and excitement. I also felt a presence like a warm, emotional light. The excitement was not only mine, but his. I could feel that Jesus was excited about what had just happened between us. I cannot prove this because it was all nonverbal. He spoke no audible words to me. I had only read six chapters of the New Testament, so I had little biblical basis for anything I was feeling. I simply felt that Jesus was happy and smiling at me, and it felt like a warm light shining on me. When I woke up the next morning, I still felt the light. I had a summer job in downtown Denver delivering blueprints on a bicycle. As I went through my day, I was in a heightened state of spiritual awareness and excitement. I felt like I was floating ten feet above my bicycle seat. I rode past a light pole that had a sticker on it that read, "Jesus loves you." I had written by this same pole every day that summer, but I had never seen the sticker before. I couldn't stop the words from coming out of my mouth. I agree. Jesus loves me. I had been a Christian for only seven hours, and I was already enjoying the first ingredient of healthy soil. Over the following year, my Bible reading led me to 2 Corinthians 4, 6, which gave me words from my experience. For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness, made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory, displayed in the face of Christ." Even today, when I read this verse, it takes me back to that night. This is what I felt when I met Jesus. I felt the light of His face shining on me. I could feel it in my body. If Dr. Shore is right about the definition of joy, being what I feel when I see the sparkle in someone's eye that conveys, "I'm happy to be with you," I was experiencing joy. Jesus's eyes were sparkling at me. His face was shining on me, and I could feel it. I wondered whether this was what it felt like to be a Christian. As far as I knew, none of my friends were Christians, so I had no one to ask. Joy was new to me because I did not grow up in a Christian family. My parents did not take us to church or talk about God. When our family visited my grandmother in Nebraska, she would take us to her small church on Sunday mornings. I did not feel joy there. These visits were my only exposure to church. For the rest of the summer, I continued reading the New Testament to learn more about Jesus, and I kept feeling Him smiling at me. As my summer came to an end, I moved back to the university for my sophomore year. I was unpacking my suitcase in my dorm room when Steve Lowe walked in, said his two suitcases on the floor and said, "Before I unpack, I need to talk to you." Steve and I had become friends as freshmen, and we decided to room together our sophomore year. He continued, "Last year we partied a lot and got drunk, but I'm a Christian. Over the summer I decided that I'm not going to do that anymore. You might not want to live with me this year. I'm not going to party with you. I'm done with that." As soon as I heard Steve say that he was a Christian, I ignored everything else he said and waited for him to stop talking. As soon as I got my chance, I blurted out, "I'm a Christian too." I remember the stunned look on his face as I told him about my encounter with Jesus in the middle of the night. I had been reading Matthew for a month, and I did not understand much of what I read. I had a thousand questions, so Steve sat down, and we talked for two hours. He knew a lot more about the Bible and walking with Jesus than I did. After I couldn't think of any more questions to ask, Steve said, "We should find a Christian group here on campus and meet some other Christians." I did not know what a Christian group was or did, but we found one and got involved. I heard the students in this group call it a ministry. I didn't know what that word meant. They talked about evangelism. I didn't know that word either. They used a lot of words I didn't know. They also sang songs that were strange to my musical ears. I liked the people, though, and quickly got into a small group. Within a few weeks, I was studying the Bible with new friends, and they taught me the basics about being a disciple of Jesus. They taught me how to study the Bible, how to pray, and how to share my faith. One thing I wasn't taught was the importance of joy and relational attachments. I wasn't taught it, but I was shown it. I lived a very different life that year compared to my freshman year. We talked about Jesus all the time. We prayed for each other. We did homework and ate meals together. Once a semester, we prayed all night long. We had a weekly meeting, and when I showed up, I could feel that I belonged. Faces lit up when I walked into the room. My face lit up, too, and it felt similar to what I experienced with Jesus. This was joy, but I did not know it at the time. Joy and the neglected face of God. I thought back on these experiences in college as we continued meeting with Jim Wilder and learned about the importance of joy. I was fascinated and decided to learn all I could. I found out from Jim and others that God designed our brains to run on joy like a car runs on fuel. Jim said, "Our brains desire joy more than any other thing." As we go through our day, our right brains are scanning our surroundings, looking for people who are happy to be with us. I read through the Bible looking for joy, and I found it everywhere. I already shared that Second Corinthians 4, 6, talks about the light of God shining in the face of Jesus. Number 6, 24-26, is a blessing that God taught to Israel. It became a regular prayer of blessing for the Jewish nation. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace. When I read the Lord make His face shine on you and the Lord turn His face toward you, this sounded like the neurological definition of joy. This blessing falls under the definition of joy that Dr. Shored discovered from his research on the brain. We don't know His beliefs, but the professor was discovering what God knew all along. God designed our brains for joy, and He wants us to live in the glow of His delight. This blessing expresses a joy that can be paraphrased. May you feel the joy of God's face shining on you because He is happy to be with you. Joy is both misunderstood and neglected in the modern church. Jim mentioned that in his many years of education in theology and psychology, he was never taught about the importance of joy. I have a master's degree from a seminary and was never exposed to more than a rote explanation of joy. One reason for the lack of a coherent theology of joy is word choices translators make in some Bible versions. When translating the original languages of the Bible, joy sometimes disappears in modern languages. We see it clearly in the Hebrew, but it gets lost in translation. An example is Psalm 89-15. The NIV translates this, "Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence, Lord." In the Hebrew, in the light of your presence, is literally in the light of your face. This is not an isolated example. Over and over I discovered the neglected face of God. God's face is connected with joy in the Bible. One of the first scriptures I memorized when I was a new Christian was Psalm 16-11. In your presence is fullness of joy, NASB. However, the original Hebrew renders this verse, "Abundance of joy with your face." Psalm 21 lists the blessings of God for the King of Israel. In verse 6, the psalmist proclaims, "You make him joyful with gladness in your presence, NASB." The word for word rendering of the Hebrew is, "You make him happy with joy with your face." In scripture, we see that the face of God brings us joy, but God's face gets erased in translation. Some versions of the Bible alter the image of God's face shining on us, presenting a more generic concept of God's presence and favor. Translators may do this to make the text more readable, but an important bodily sensation is lost. The light of God's presence does not feel the same in our bodies as the light of God's face. God designed facial recognition circuitry into our brains and linked it to our joy center. My wife's face lights up when she sees me, and this initiates a joyful chain reaction in my brain that I can feel in my body. Brain science reveals that this joy sensation is crucial for emotional and relational development. Our brain looks specifically to the face of another person to find joy, and this fills up our emotional gas tank. The face is key. When a Bible translation erases the picture of God's face, our brains do not react as strongly. A right-brained dominant relational sensation, joy, God's face shining on us, is replaced with a less corporeal statement of fact, God is present with us. They both are important aspects of God's love for us, but they are not the same. This may seem like nitpicking, but there is a difference in the way our bodies respond. God designed our brains to seek joy through eyes and facial expressions, through being with people who are glad to be with us. When I compared the many scriptures that describe God's face shining on us with what I now know about how our brains were designed, I came to three important points of convergence. Number one, joy is primarily transmitted through the face, especially the eyes, and secondarily through voice. Number two, joy is relational. It is what we feel when we are with someone who is happy to be with us. Joy does not exist outside of a relationship. Number three, joy is important to God and to us. Reading through the Bible and replacing joy with the concept of God's face lighting up gives us a better idea of what joy means and how it feels in our bodies. For example, if we rewrite Psalm 1611 using the fuller definition of joy, in your presence's fullness of joy becomes when your face lights up because you are so happy to be with me, you fill me up with joy. In John 15, Jesus talks about how He loves His disciples with the same love that the Father has for Him. Then He says, "I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete," verse 11. If we replace joy with the fuller definition, Jesus' statement would be, "My Father's face lights up when He sees me because I am so special to Him. I am telling you this so that you will feel how special you are to my Father and to me. Our faces are shining on you with delight. I can feel that in my body when I picture it. Can you?" Losing our bodies Another reason joy is disregarded is that we often neglect bodily sensations in our modern Christian practice. This happens not only with the word joy; it represents a general trend. Words that are strongly connected to sensations in our bodies are translated in ways that are more cerebral and conceptual. For example, when Jesus is walking down the road and hears two blind men crying out to Him for healing, we read that He had compassion on them, Matthew 20, 34. The word compassion comes from a Greek verb that means "to be moved in ones in testons or guts." Jesus saw these blind men pleading for help and his stomach ached with compassion. Compassion is felt in our bodies, just like joy. The disconnection of our bodies from our experience of God is a direct consequence of a half-brained Christianity. The right hemisphere is where the internal and spatial sensations of our body are brought together and coordinated, giving us what one researcher calls an integrated sense of the body. Our right brain governs our emotions and awareness of our bodies. In times of distress, low joy, or general left-brained dominant living, this integration dims or breaks down. We will often feel outside our bodies or in our minds. In left-brained Christianity, we tend to lose our sense of feeling God's presence in our body. The right brain governs this ability, so as we gravitate toward a full-brained discipleship, we grow to experience God in our bodies. We believe that God designed our bodies to feel and enjoy Him. Experiencing God in my body was a foreign concept to me when I first encountered this teaching. I remember asking, "Jim, what am I supposed to feel?" He responded that different people feel God's joy in different ways. What is important is that we are aware of something. Butterflies on our skin, electricity going up the back of our neck, a tightness in our gut, a sense of warmth or lightness. Feeling joy in our bodies indicates that our right brain is functioning smoothly. When we lose this bodily connection, it is a sign that our brain is not running well. When our children were infants, we would put them to sleep early in the evening. Later, before going to bed, I would tip toe in to look at them as they slept. In the darkness of their room, my face would beam the light of joy as I watched them sleep. I could hardly contain my pleasure as I drank in hell precious they were to me. If I imagine my heavenly Father doing that to me, I can feel joy in my stomach. I can feel my body react to my Father's face. The physical human body was designed to respond to joy. Joy illustrates the importance of our bodies while walking with Jesus. We are meant to sense the emotional signals of life in our flesh and bones. God designed us to feel His presence, but in my experience, this aspect of discipleship was missing. When was the last time your church offered a class on feeling God in your body? It might even sound creepy to our modern ears. Joy is a visceral response to our relationship with God. Remember the response when pregnant Mary visited her cousin? When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, Luke 1, 41. Our whole bodies respond as we encounter the living God. As I studied more about the role of joy and spiritual formation, I saw the benefits piling up. When Jim told me that he discovered the importance of joy and brought it to his counseling practice, he saw drastic changes in the lives of his patients. His clinic treated difficult cases that other clinics and churches had given up on, and most patients arrived to their first session in a state of severely low joy. Previously, the clinic would need to hospitalize a large percentage of these patients during their treatment. Their counseling sessions would send them into such deep trauma that they could no longer function. Jim and the other therapists had come to accept that hospitalization was a normal part of recovery. Once the clinic started focusing on building patients' joy before treating their trauma, hospitalization rates plummeted to almost zero. They were filling up their client's gas tanks with joy fuel before beginning the heavy work of trauma recovery. Trying to do emotionally taxing work with an empty tank is like running a marathon without having eaten food for a month. Eventually, your body will shut down for lack of energy. Jim's patients would emotionally collapse. We run the same danger in our churches and families when we do not build our joy together as a part of ministry. We eventually drain our tanks and run on empty. Joy helps us regulate our emotions and endure suffering. Jesus refused to relinquish joy in the midst of his suffering on the cross. When we are able to stay relationally connected to others and God, we experience joy while we suffer. Joy does not remove our pain, but it gives us the strength to endure. Remember that joy is relational, so joy in suffering means that God and our community are glad to be with us in our distress. They do not allow us to suffer alone. We are able to bear our suffering like Jesus, who for the joy set before him endured the cross. Hebrews 12-2-NASB Contrary to what some preachers say in their sermons on Jesus' seven last words, he never lost touch of his father's face shining on him as he was tortured and humiliated. Hebrews 12-2 tells us, "For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." He could see through the angry faces in the crowd to the kind and steady gaze of his father. His joy sustained him. The author of Hebrews exhorts us to handle our suffering the same way, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of faith. Hebrews 12-2-NASB Jesus' face helps us persevere through the pain of life. It is important to remember that joy is not strictly an emotion. We might refer to it as a "supra" emotion because it can go on top of and connect with other emotions. For example, if I lose my job, this is usually not considered a joyful occasion. Instead, I am probably feeling some combination of sadness, fear and anger. However, when I experience these unpleasant emotions and can simultaneously feel that God is with me, I have added joy into the mix. If I have close friends who are also happy to be with me in my loss, my joy magnifies even more. Now I'm feeling sad and joyful, fearful and joyful, angry and joyful. Joy does not replace the unpleasant emotions. Instead, it combines with my emotions to keep me relationally connected into stress. The importance of joy to our brain highlights the fact that we must suffer in community. We were not meant to suffer alone. We need to lean on God and on our people in times of distress. We naturally do this when a family member dies. Everyone comes together in order to share the sadness. We tell stories about the deceased. We eat together. We sit in silence. We are joyful, not happy because we want to suffer together. This is the definition of joy. I want to be with you. Joy is relational in its essence. Joy is the foundation for a secure bond with God. When I trust that God is happy to be with me and is smiling at me, this joy naturally removes fear from the relationship. A goal we have in our bond with God is to nurture a loving relationship until it has no fear. One of Jesus' disciples explains it well. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 1 John 4, 18 Joy is the path to a fearless love for God. Our identity is built and formed by joy-bonded relationships. The identity center in our brain grows in response to joy, which helps us act like ourselves in all situations. In a performance-based relationship or community, our identity becomes distorted because we feel the need to perform. When we put on a pretend self, our joy starts decreasing. We can build joy only with our true self. When churches foster a performance-based environment that encourages us to simply put on a happy face when we are suffering, it will quickly run out of joy. We will explore the importance of our identity in chapter 5. I have already mentioned that joy helps us experience God's presence in our bodies. I could keep listing more benefits, but let me quote a book, Jim co-authored. When we are the sparkle in someone's eyes, their face lights up with a smile when they see us. We feel joy. From the moment we are born, joy shapes the chemistry, structure, and growth of our brain. Joy lays the foundation for how well we will handle relationships, emotions, pain, and pleasure throughout our lifetime. Joy creates an identity that is stable and consistent over time. Joy gives us the freedom to share our hearts with God and others, expressing our joyful identity creates space for others to belong. Joy gives us the freedom to live without masks because, in spite of our weaknesses, we know we are loved. We are not afraid of our vulnerabilities or exposure. Joy gives us the freedom from fear to live from the heart Jesus gave us. We discover increasing delight in becoming the people God knew we could be. God designed us to live on a rich diet of joy-filled relationships. Communities that take joy building seriously will experience all of the benefits previously listed and more. Since joy happens when people are glad to be together, take a moment to remember your own experiences in joyful groups. Have you seen any of these benefits of joy? I feel like I belong. I feel more stable when things go wrong. It is easier to be myself. I feel free to share my heart with God and others. Increasing joy capacity When I learned that joy was relational and often non-verbal, I asked Jim at one gathering, "How do I increase my joy?" He looked at me across the table and asked me to close my eyes. He said, "Think of a memory that makes you feel grateful and connected to God in that moment." Then he told me to go back and relive the experience for ten seconds. I closed my eyes and went back to a memory in the mountains of Colorado. I sensed God encouraging me as I watched a red-tailed hawk. I remembered seeing the wind ruffling the feathers of its neck as it sat on top of a ponderosa pine tree. I opened my eyes as Jim asked me to give the memory a short title. I didn't hesitate. Red-tailed hawk. Jim then asked me what I felt in my body when I relived red-tailed hawk. I sat in silence for a few seconds. It was hard for me to describe. It feels like a cramp of excitement between my chest and my stomach. Next, he asked, "What do you think God might have been wanting to impress on you by that memory?" I had to sit for a while. This was not natural for me, so I closed my eyes again. And as I remembered the wind ruffling the feathers of the hawk, I answered, "God is reminding me that He loves me and is with me. And I also sensed that He is very glad I am in this room right now learning from you." Jim said that this exercise is designed to increase a person's joy capacity. He instructed all of us around the table to start a list of grateful memories with a goal of having at least ten. Red-tailed hawk is your first entry. Use the list to go into five minutes of non-verbal gratitude every day. Non-verbal gratitude is right-brained. No words are necessary, just memories. I usually need to use several on my list to maintain a state of gratitude for five solid minutes. Jim stressed that it was important for each memory to have two characteristics. One, I am aware of the sensations in my body as I relive it, and two, I feel some sort of connection with God in the memory. These two characteristics assure that my right brain stays involved in the practice. Otherwise, it can easily shift toward left-brained gratitude, words, instead of right-brained gratitude, images, autobiographical memories, relational connection, body integration. Building joy is a right-brained dominant exercise. In the book Joyful Journey, Jim and his co-authors explain the importance of gratitude. When we keep practicing gratitude with God, our brain remembers what our connection with Him was like, making it easier for us to find our way back to Him. Gratitude is the first step to building joy into our lives and helps us experience a more consistent attachment with God. We do not directly choose to be more joyful any more than we can choose to have lower blood pressure. The joy and blood pressure systems in the brain are not subject to direct choice. Joy levels are regulated indirectly through relationships. Increasing joy will involve improving our relational skills, training our brain, and getting involved in tightly bonded community. Filling a person with joy fuels their brain with relational energy. When our bodies can feel the glow of Jesus' face shining on us, our joy capacity grows. As our joy grows, our faces shine on each other, which makes other people feel joy. When we throw in some intentional practices to magnify joy, we are on the way to creating a high joy community. We are adding an essential nutrient to replenish our spiritual soil. Practice builds our joy capacity, providing relational energy to everything else. Our joy capacity can grow in size as we learn to fill ourselves with joy. The size of our joy tank grows. The first skills I was taught as a young Christian were to read Scripture and pray. These practices are important and helpful and have formed who I am, but I was not taught how to refill when my tank gets drained. I was never trained to experience joy in the middle of painful emotions. As our tight-knit college groups slowly dispersed, I felt my joy start to sink. The high joy life I had taken for granted for eight years suddenly felt elusive. I knew little about joy at the time, so I described myself as feeling a little off. I kept going to church, reading the Bible and praying, but I was running on empty. Feelings of hopelessness crept into my life, eventually bottoming out in depression. What was I doing wrong? The human brain was designed to look for and run on joy. My joy drops when I sense few faces shining on me and few people happy to be with me. I may start believing that God is no longer happy to be with me. I am isolated and lonely. If my community is not in the habit of expressing what God sees as special in each of us, our eyes do not meet and our faces do not shine when we see each other. Our soil becomes depleted. When we do not understand how joy works, we miss the treasure before our eyes. Since joy helps us regulate painful emotions, when it runs low, we will look to non-relational sources to stop the pain. Soil that is low on joy is primed for growing addictions. When our brain looks for joy and does not find it, we become vulnerable to pseudo-joys. These are substances and experiences that trick our brain to temporarily shut off the unpleasant emotions, but they are non-relational and ultimately unsatisfying. Joy substitutes can appear on the surface to be normal things, like food, social media and shopping. The more obvious pseudo-joys are alcohol, drugs, sugar and porn. Low-joy cultures will see an increase in these pseudo-joy addictions. Increasing our joy will naturally calm our cravings for pseudo-joys and building joy should be an integrated part of any addiction program. When we ignore the importance of joy in our churches, we leave an important variable to chance. When our joy is running low, much of life does not function. Imagine that you are on the support team for a Formula One race car. You are going through your pre-race checklist right before a race. You diligently check the oil, tires and fluids, but an important item is not on your checklist. There is no line item to ensure the gas tank is filled. If you skip checking the gas tank, your car may work well or not. It depends on whether someone remembered to fill the tank. As a pastor, this analogy explains a mistake I made. I led discipleship trainings that did not take joy into account, when I saw was inconsistency. I was left scratching my head, wondering what was going wrong. The training worked well for some people and not for others. This made sense when I learned the function of joy. If half of the people arrived to my training with their tanks already full and the other half arrived on empty, what would you expect? I had failed to make sure everyone was fueled up for the training. Now I would use the measures and exercises like those in the Triad Out section at the end of this chapter. Churches and families often have reasons why their joy is low. We call these joy leaks and we must find where joy is leaking and plug the holes. One cause of draining joy is a lack of development around the six big emotions. Sadness, anger, fear, shame, disgust and despair. Creating a path from the big emotions to joy allows our brain to regulate the emotions instead of getting stuck in them. Regulation means that we stay relationally connected and continue to be the person God created us to be when we suffer. This concept of creating paths to joy might be new to you, so I will explain. When I experience a big, distressing emotion that has not been connected to joy, my personality will change and I will tend to isolate. These undeveloped emotional paths cause joy levels to drop because I get stuck and isolated in the unpleasant emotion. When I am stuck, I lose my true identity and start acting like a different person. We all have experienced this breakdown of our identity and have seen it in others. I once had a boss who liked me and treated me well. When he became angry, however, he acted like a crazy person. He was cruel, abrupt and distant. He stopped acting like himself. One of the joy building exercises is designed to build a path from all of the difficult emotions to joy. This pathway allows me to suffer and remain joyful. Not happy, but joyful. My people and my God pull me through because they are glad to be with me in my suffering. Building resilience in difficult emotions is like buying a new cabin on a lake that has no path down to the dock. The first few trips to the dock take time and effort with a shovel and a machete. Following the path gets easier until, after a hundred trips, you have a well-worn path between the cabin and the dock. My wife and I are currently training to connect the big six emotions to joy. In the training, we start treading the path between difficult emotions and joy. Repetition is needed to build the path, but the results are visceral. My wife and I can feel that our inner emotional structure is changing. We are able to remain joyful in distressing emotions that would have previously left us feeling isolated. Since starting this training, I often have encounters with strong emotions that I can now regulate. I recently went fishing with friends on the Eagle River outside of Vale, Colorado. The Eagle River is known for its difficult waiting. It is full of large boulders that one fly shop owner called Snot Covered Bowling Bowls. I could attest to the accuracy of his vivid description when I snagged my fly on a log in the middle of the river. I needed to wait across to unhook my fly, so I took my time and carefully placed each step. I was able to retrieve my flies. As I made my way back, I took a step and slipped on one bowling bowl and then another until I lost my footing completely and went under. I smashed my knee on a boulder and almost filled my waders with freezing water. As I awkwardly dog paddled and then picked myself up, I felt the adrenaline surging through my body in the familiar emotional wave coming. I had done this before. Then my training kicked in. I took a few deep breaths, quieted myself, and started talking to Jesus. Within a minute, I was able to laugh about it. Two years previous, before my training, I would have sunk into a stew of anger and shame that would have lasted 20 minutes. Here I was, back on my feet, and laughing in a minute. No joy leaked that day. Another culprit that leaks joy is unresolved trauma. From the brain's perspective, trauma happens anytime we suffer alone. Suffering turns into trauma when we are unable to process our suffering with God and other people. Trauma is stored in our brain, in circuits of flesh, kind of like an armed mouse trap. When something goes wrong that feels like a previous trauma to our brain, not only do we experience unpleasant emotions, but our trauma gets triggered. The mouse trap goes snap. The trauma magnifies the already big feelings, and we get stuck in distress. After we recover, we will often wonder, "Why did I overreact so much?" We may have no conscious memory of the trauma, but our right brain remembers. When we see an emotional reaction that is disproportionate to the circumstances, we are likely seeing the stored energy of unhealed trauma. Healing these stored emotions is beyond the scope of this book, but you will not be surprised to learn that it requires a full-brained treatment. When you heal trauma, the energy stored in the traumatic memory dissipates and is no longer triggerable. You have just plugged the hole in your joy tank. Another joy leak is the prevalence of video screens in our daily lives. We use smartphones, television and movie screens to fill our idle minutes or hours. Joy and screen time are inversely proportional. When our eyes and face are staring at our phones, we are not engaging with the faces around us. The joy drains out of our communities by depriving ourselves of each other's faces. Our need for face-to-face time is designed into our flesh and cannot be substituted with a screen. Our brains can distinguish between a real face and a face on a screen, even when we are infants. Our neurological circuits do not react to screens the same as they do to live faces. Since we need facial joy like we need food and oxygen, we are starving ourselves of relational nutrition. Parents can start by putting limits on screen time and emphasizing face-to-face conversation. You will be surprised how different you and your family will feel when you look at each other in the face. Plugging this joy leak will involve being counter-cultural. Churches must lead the way by restoring joy to our soil. Finally, a narcissist in the community rips a gaping hole in our joy tank. A church or family will have a hard time raising joy without patching this hole, and it is a difficult hole to repair. The goal of this book is to explain how we create spiritual soil that grows character and is resistant to the growth of narcissism. A narcissistic person has a hard time thriving and growing roots in healthy soil. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Handling a narcissist who is already rooted in your community, possibly as a leader, is beyond the scope of this book. Jim Wilder has written at length on this topic in the Pandora problem. The teaching and training in the Pandora problem are designed to help heal narcissism that is already in the church. Maintaining joy and acting like ourselves in the presence of narcissism is advanced discipleship, requiring well-developed maturity. After hearing Jim explain the importance of joy and understanding how God designed our brains for joy, I wondered how to fit this into my job as a pastor of spiritual formation. For four years, I had been designing a step-by-step path to maturity for the members of our church. It included learning theology, reading scripture, and practicing spiritual disciplines. I wondered where joy would fit into my current plan, and it became obvious that joy is the first step. Since nothing else works well when joy is low, it makes sense to fill up the gas tank at the beginning. If we desire to fulfill the Great Commission, we will turn our churches into high joy environments. This is a community where our faces light up when we see each other. We practice helping each other increase joy capacity as part of our regular practices. Our community is contagious when people come and see our joyful interactions. Young or old, Christian or not, our brains hunger for joy. In the first years of life, our joy comes from our caretakers. Later, as adults, we can intentionally increase our joy capacity, and this work will improve our brain chemistry. Many low-joy friendships can quickly be energized simply by learning about joy and taking action to build capacity. Since my wife and I learned about the importance of joy, we are intentional about slowing down and letting our faces shine on each other. I let my wife know, using my face and eyes, how special she is to me. If I've had a hard day and my joy is low, I will take Claudius hand and we will sit on the couch facing each other. We let our eyes meet and smile as we enjoy our connection. We don't stare but settle into a nice rhythm of using our faces to non-verbally communicate, "I am glad to be with you." We do this for several seconds and then close our eyes and breathe deeply. Then we re-engage. Occasionally we talk, but words are not necessary. We do this exercise in rhythm for several minutes and I quickly feel my joy rising. Just like Claudia and I had to change our patterns in order to build more joy, turning our churches into high-joy environments will require changes. Church styles may be entrenched, so these changes may not come easily. Improving each soil nutrient will present new challenges that we will address as we go. Remember that joy is a right brain dominant emotion requiring face-to-face interactions. We need to learn to embrace eye contact. Churches are often configured to support left brain dominant activities, thinking, doctrine, words, and strategies. The first challenge might be arranging our meetings in a way that promotes eye contact. Current formats offer little time or intention to focus on relational joy. In fact, some people hate the idea of having to stop and interact during church. It does not seem like what we should do in church. Making changes to create joy will be uncomfortable for some. The other half of church will touch areas of our lives that are unfamiliar. Leaders and worshipers might hear complaints about changing what is comfortable. Someone may protest that the church is growing in size and giving. Why upset things by trying to increase joy? Character formation and building joy are inextricably linked. Jesus prayed for the joyful character of his followers when he prayed that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. John 17, 13. Only when we are convinced that character transformation is the central task of the church will we be intentional about raising joy. Leaders and worshipers must both be involved in making these changes. The first step for increasing joy is establishing effective gratitude practices. One friend of mine likes to say, "Graditude is the on-ramp to joy." When we all start practicing gratitude each day and sharing our experiences and our gatherings, we are ramping up joy together. Another practice for increasing joy may be uncomfortable for many Western people and may even seem risky. If joy is transmitted primarily through our faces and eyes, we need to practice letting our faces light up with each other. There is some danger to this practice, so we must handle it wisely. We require that, unless you are a married couple or family members, facial joy exercises should be done in groups of three, not two. The hormones released as we build joy can easily be confused for romantic feelings, and this can lead to emotional misunderstanding and inappropriate interactions. Training is not meant to be a matchmaking opportunity, and this confusion can destabilize the entire community. Married couples will benefit greatly from building joy together. This cycle of joy, quiet, joy, quiet is the same cycle that God designed to energize the formation of a baby's brain, and it works for adults too. Building joy involves a cycle of joy and then disconnecting to quiet ourselves. In church training, we perform this same exercise in groups of three. In this case, you can practice with complete strangers and build joy together. It helps to be guided the first time by someone who has experienced building joy in this joy-quiet cycle. Since this practice is new to most people, training needs to be accompanied by good teaching offering the biblical basis for building joy. In small groups, something as simple as greeting each person with a brief eye-to-eye connection and telling them how happy you are to see them raises the joy in your group. Small groups also would benefit by incorporating intentional practices of joy and gratitude. Start your group by having each person share a gratitude story from their week. We also increase joy by telling each other what we find special in them. Raising the joy level in a family starts with the parents. As with most of the right brain work we do, I cannot pass a skill to my child through words alone. I must practice the skill myself. To raise joy in a family, the first step is to raise the joy of the parents. You and your spouse can enjoy the benefits of doing the 30-day joy on demand exercise. The joy you build will quickly spill over into the entire family. Families benefit when the parents intentionally build joy with each other and their children. Parents can make changes to their family structure to balance screen-centered family time with face-centered times. Looking our children in the face and telling them how special they are sets them up for a life full of relational energy. During dinner time, Claudia and I sometimes go around the table and share something for which we are grateful. Even when our children are having problems with behavior or school, we can still be happy to be with them. God is also happy to be with us even when our lives are a mess. A beautiful trait of joy is that it does not require good circumstances. Another step we take to build joy in our family is to make our dining table a phone-free zone. All eyes are up and looking at each other as we enjoy a meal. Here are some closing thoughts. When we church leaders fail to build joy among our people, we allow people to run their lives with their spiritual gas tanks on empty. Our people are deprived of an essential relational nutrient for a healthy soil that supports discipleship. When we discover ways to build joy together, we awaken the relational half of church that our busy culture squeezes out of our lives. Joy puts us on the path to transformation. You've been listening to the other half of church podcast, a podcast at the intersection of brain science, theology, and church life. To learn more about the book by Jim Wilder and Michael Hendricks, visit theotherhalfofchurch.com.