Count It All Joy

“My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations.” (James 1:2). I think if we were to ask the Savior what percentage of His mortal life was filled with joy, He would tell us that it was 100%. I truly believe that Jesus counted it all joy - even when He was rejected by His own community, even when He was abandoned by His friends, even when He was forsaken by His Father. To have our lives full of joy does not mean that they will also always be filled with only happiness and ease and comfort and bliss and pleasure. Joy is deeper than happiness because it also includes sadness. Joy is stronger than ease and comfort because it also embraces challenges and adversities. Joy is more satisfying than bliss and pleasure because it incorporates pain and anguish. Our Savior was able to have joy even in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the Cross in Golgotha because even though this was the hardest and most painful thing He or anyone else has ever had to endure, nevertheless, He was finding that He had the strength and the courage and the will to fulfill His mission and He was thinking not only of His own pain and sorrow, but also of the joy that He would share with all of us for all of eternity thanks to the sacrifice He was presently enduring. We each have the capacity to follow in the footsteps of our Savior and count it all joy - the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the painful and the pleasurable. This doesn't mean our joy always has to look like happiness or comfort. The joy that we feel as we are struggling to push the boulder up the hill is different from the joy we feel when we get to bask for a moment in the light of the sun at the top of the hill, but we can choose to count all of it as joy.