Delight

I’ve been writing for this blog for a long time, and I was today years old (as the meme goes) when I found out that our blog has a purpose statement. “Our purpose is to publish Christian writing that delights readers and engages the world in a Reformed way.”

Doesn’t the notion of delight sound…just delightful?

I recently saw a short clip from Greg Boyle about delight. He said anxiety can creep in when we forget to delight in the present moment.

Normally a little aphorism like that would annoy me, but I can hear almost anything from the likes of Father Boyle — the priest who has pointed me to Christ through the funny, poignant, hopeful stories of ex-gang members in L.A. — and believe it to be true.

But if you watch the video, Boyle doesn’t describe something trite or sanitized when he talks about “the present moment.” He’s not asking me to focus on the deliciousness of my hot cup of coffee and mute NPR’s coverage of the Omicron variant. Boyle describes “the present moment” as a man undergoing chemotherapy. A person with a phobia of flying who is tossed about by extreme turbulence. The kinds of experiences you can’t just disassociate from.

Boyle’s not asking me to shrink my world, to put my head in the sand, to drown out the concerns, the threats, the hurts by hyperfocusing on something I like instead.

In this way, I think Greg Boyle and the Reformed Journal are on the same page. When we aim to delight readers, we aim to do so not by eschewing the world, but by engaging it.

We believe that the framework of Reformed theology gives us something solid to stand on as we open our eyes, tell the truth, ask the hard question. On this blog, we engage the present moment. The pandemic, the politics, the problems. We look for God in it. We look for God in each other. We believe God is present. What greater delight is there than experiencing this God-come-near?

I hope you’ll consider a contribution to our scrappy little delight-project. Our writers don’t get paid, but the cost of web hosting, tech support, and other line items are supported by readers like you. Your support would be, in a word, delightful.