About 6 months ago I began marking in blue, every word in my scriptures that related to joy or happiness. I now have quite a few marked. It is fun to look through my scriptures and see the words colored in blue. I never really noticed before how often the scriptures mention joy and gladness, until I started marking them. I got the idea from the book Pollyanna. In the book, Pollyanna tells her minister friend that their are 800 "rejoicing texts" in the Bible, glad passages as they are called in the movie. If there are 800 passages in the Bible that talk about joy, I'm thinking there should be at least 200 in the Book of Mormon, and probably a lot more than that. That would mean the scriptures talk about joy and gladness over 1000 times. Wow!
A few of my favorites so far are:
2 Nephi 2:25 "...men are, that they might have joy."
2 Nephi 5:27 "And it came to pass that we lived after the manner of happiness."
2 Nephi 8:3 "For the Lord shall comfort Zion, he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody."
Psalm 30:11 "thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness"
Pollyanna tells the minister, "if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it --some."
I completely agree.
UPDATE: After I posted this, I was checking blogs and I read this great post by Chocolate on my Cranium about living after the manner of happiness.
1 comment:
I like the idea of using one color to mark all the words about joy and happiness. What a great visual way to instantly see God does want us to be happy!
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