Straight From The Hart
By Joan Rowden Hart
On the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving in 1964, just a week after Milan and I had celebrated our first wedding anniversary, we were at the Taylor Avenue Church of God practicing with the youth for our Thanksgiving service to be held the next night.
We received a phone call at the church for Milan and me to go immediately to my grandmother’s home because something had happened to my youngest sister, Darella Kay Rowden, then 16 years of age and a junior at LHS.
We arrived only minutes before Dorsey Howe, who sadly informed us that Kay had been killed in an automobile accident out on East Hwy 32, and her best friend, Beverly Cole, who was in the car with her, had been seriously injured.
Our Thanksgiving was less than “happy” that year, but I learned a lesson I have never forgotten. As human beings, our sometimes shallow perception of happiness is usually based on words related to being happy such as happenings, mishap, and happenstance, all implying something external to us but that affects us whether for good or bad.
The death of a beloved sibling had happened, and it was an unfortunate happenstance, so we were not happy.
But you know what? We still had joy in our thanksgiving that year, because joy comes from deep within, like the old children’s song “I’ve got joy like a fountain”, an expression of gratitude and peace and assurance bubbling up from our inner being.
Joy is permanent. It cannot be affected by what happens to us externally. It doesn’t change with day to day happenings, which do affect our happiness from time to time.
The distinction we noticed between happiness and joy that year was apparent when we had God’s joy in our hearts even in our sadness about Kay’s death. But we were made happy on Thanksgiving Day when my sister, Lois Rowden Cook, gave birth to a lovely little girl with strawberry blonde hair. She and her husband Frank named the baby Toni, and many of you know her today as Toni Pitts Morris and she blesses you with her musical talent at many events around the county every year.
So we celebrated Thanksgiving with joy in 1964, knowing that Kay was safe in heaven with Jesus because of the promises given to us by our Resurrected Saviour that being absent from the body means being present with the Lord.
The beautiful body we had to bury on Friday after Thanksgiving Day was only the home in which Kay had lived for sixteen years, a home she no longer needed because she was in her heavenly home by then.
I had been the worship leader for several years at the Taylor Avenue Church of God and some friends and family members suggested the following Sunday that I might not feel up to leading the music because of my grief.
But here’s where that irrepressible and everlasting joy came in again. I knew the joy of Christian hope even in the unhappiness of losing my sister, so I began the song service that Sunday morning with a Heritage Hymn of the Church of God which says “Have we any hope within us of a life beyond the grave in the fair and vernal lands? Do we know that when our earthly house by death shall be dissolved, we’ve a house not made with hands? We have a hope within our souls, brighter than the perfect day. God has given us His Spirit and we want the world to hear it, all our doubts are passed away.”
Many times in the past 48 years I have had occasion to reaffirm the fact that our joy is everlasting, even when we cannot be happy about what’s going on around us.
The death of my stepfather Clarence Lindsey ten years later in a freak car and pedestrian accident, and the loss of my brother Denzil Lindsey who was killed by a drunken driver just months after his honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy, as well as losing my beloved grandmother, Nellie Dame, to cancer in 1984, all brought home again the fact that what happens to us has no effect on the joy we have within our heart.
So no matter what is happening in your life or home or family this week, you can still celebrate the true meaning of gratitude for all we have and for the joy you have in your heart if you are a believer in Christ.
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