A New Kind of Joy

Lisa Jackson’s Story

Hi, I'm Lisa Jackson. I grew up in church, and I've always known that God loves me. When I was seven, I realized that Jesus’ sacrifice was for me. Because I was sinful, I needed His salvation. So, I put my faith and trust in Him.

I loved being at church and doing everything there. I did Bible studies, mission trips, and ministries. I just loved working for the Lord and being around His people. In fact, my world revolved around church and the relationships I had there.

Shaken and Searching

When I was a senior in high school, I survived a mass shooting that took place at that church, and it turned my world upside down. I decided that the only thing in life that really mattered was relationships—my relationship with God, my family, and with everybody around me.

What made that more difficult was that I saw people I loved connecting and building relationships really easily, and I struggled with it. It was then that resentment started to creep in.

Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that because God brought me through the shooting, I shouldn’t struggle with hard things in life—because nothing could be as hard as what I had already gone through. I believed that trusting God with my unmet expectations shouldn’t be difficult, at least not in comparison.

But as the years went on and more hard circumstances came up, I found myself getting angry at myself when I struggled to trust God in the new hard things. That core group of deep friendships I longed for always seemed out of reach. I was single, and my hopes of having a family of my own seemed to be slipping away.

As the days went on, I started to let my circumstances dictate my joy. And because my circumstances weren’t what I wanted them to be, I would often get frustrated and angry. Then I’d get frustrated and angry that I was frustrated and angry—because I felt like I shouldn’t be angry. I should just have joy.

I so desperately wanted the joy that I knew I could have by trusting God, but I just wasn’t experiencing it. I felt like I should be able to muscle through the hard things in life and just have joy in Jesus, but I couldn’t.

A New Kind of Joy

It wasn’t until I was sitting in a room listening to someone teach about anger that I was finally able to admit to myself how angry I truly was. But even then, I couldn’t fathom that God could change how I felt without changing at least some of my circumstances.

Thankfully, our God is much bigger than anything I can fathom. I started attending regeneration, our Tuesday night discipleship ministry. The program wasn’t magical, but it did force me to face hard questions, live in deep accountability with others, and look intentionally into my life to do hard, hard work.

It helped me get into the Word consistently and made space for the Lord to work in my life. It was during that season that I was finally able to start releasing some of that resentment and anger and trust God with the life I had, instead of the life I thought I should have.

God didn’t change my circumstances, but He did change my joy. Life after Regen was still really hard. I had some health battles. My living situation was hard. I was in a job where I got yelled at a lot, and money was really tight.

But it was then that God opened my eyes to see that He had me on a mission field. Slowly, through spending time with Him, being in His Word, and having other believers hold me accountable, God replaced my anger with His joy.

It still baffles me today that my joy truly no longer depends on my circumstances. If I was planning things on my own, my life today still doesn’t look like anything I would have planned. I still don’t have a family of my own. My health battles have actually gotten harder. I’m no longer in a job where I get yelled at a lot, but work still has its challenges. Those deep friendships are still hard to come by.

But God is faithful, and I have seen how He is consistently providing for me and working through all of it. Life today will never be perfect this side of heaven, right? So I’m choosing to look for God’s leading and to celebrate what He’s given me—which is a lot. And I can walk through whatever life the Lord gives me with His joy.

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