God created us to be joyful. There’s really no doubt about it. But God has left the decision whether to access that joy up to us. You and I get to decide if we’re going to choose joy—created by God, bought and paid for by Jesus’s death, given as a personal gift from the Holy Spirit—or not. When you think about it like that, it’s hard to imagine why any of us would ever refuse God’s gift of joy. But sometimes we do. Parallel Train Tracks I used to think that life came in waves: There was a wave of