Paul wrote: I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation.

To open ourselves to joy we must:
1. Embrace the fact that life is hard.

Malcolm Muggeridge: I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence has been through affliction, not happiness.

2. Open Our Minds to What is Good.

3. Be Grateful for Your Blessings.

Philippians 4.6: Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

Lou Gehrig
“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

He went on to say:
“When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat and vice versa, send you a gift, that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeeper … remember(s) you with trophies, that’s something. When you have a father and mother work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that’s the finest I know. So I close in saying that I might have had a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for.”

4. Open our Eyes to See our Purpose.

Philippians 2.15: You are to live clean, innocent lives as children of God in
a dark world full of crooked and perverse people. Let your lives shine
brightly before them.