Learning to be JOYful!

I've been doing a lot of soul searching the past few months.  I suppose it began a while back when my husband asked me if I was happy.  It had been a long, hard week, and not surprisingly, it was a question I had asked myself only days before. 

Was I happy?

I'd been cranky and irritable, and even I didn't like me.  And I began to wonder how I'd arrived at that point.  At this point in time, I was late in my third pregnancy and not feeling well physically, so I assumed a lot of my emotional frustrations came from hormones and fatigue.  I pushed through it and was doing OK...for a while.

Fast forward to this past week.  After a frustrating few days, Seth once again asked me,

Are you happy?

...because I sure wasn't acting happy.

What happens if the answer isn't immediately yes?  Why aren't I happy?  I have so much I should be happy about...but I'm back to that place where even I don't like me, and this time I don't have pregnancy hormones to blame. 

Throughout my life I would have described myself as an optimist.  I don't know when, where, or how, but somewhere along the line, I became a pessimist.  I'm usually focusing on the bad, the wrong, the what-might-go-wrong.  Not that I'm proud of this, but it's the truth.  Even as I write this, I'm stressed and anxious about a situation which Seth says just isn't a big deal.  What is going on?

So yesterday I sat in church through our service pondering my place in life.  My other blog is named, "Of Determined Purpose," because that's what my name means, but often I'm not real certain what my purpose is.  How can I be determined about an unknown purpose?  Of course I believe I was created to praise and worship God, but what is my purpose in this world...as a mom, wife, sister, daughter, friend, teacher, business owner?  What talents did God give me and how am I, or should I, be using them?       

I've posed a number of questions in this entry so far, but what I concluded during that church service was that maybe I wasn't happy because I wasn't finding the joy  in life.  I know it's there, but maybe being intentional about recognizing it would help me in my quest for happiness. 

So this is an experiment, I suppose.  This blog will be devoted to finding joy in each day.  Obviously, we were created to be JOYful (note the Bible verses in the heading of the blog).  So this is my quest to become a more JOYful person (emphasis mine).