Kindly, Kayla

Hi friends! 

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! I had a great time celebrating with my family.

For this blog post, I wanted to write about what I feel 2023 is going to be for me. The year of joy. 

God has been revealing so many things to me. To put it simply, He is good. A great God and a wonderful Father. He has shown me that He is always good, even when times and life feels hard. He is still good.

He is teaching me how to be joyful in trying times. Times when it seems like people are dying left and right, when it feels like we shouldn’t be joyful, when the people you love are mourning, but God has shown me that nevertheless, He is still good. He is showing me that joy is not based on or rely our circumstances, it’s something that He gives us. Joy is rooted in who God is. Our worldly possessions and accomplishments can make us happy, but we soon realize that we begin to want more and more and that we are never satisfied. Joy from God is everlasting and doesn’t change based on the ups and downs of life.

I want to go into 2023 filled with joy. God wants us to be joyful! He wants us to be filled with joy and the only way to get that is through Him. There are many scriptures that show that God wants us to be joyful! 

“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,”

‭‭Galatians‬ ‭5‬:‭22‬ ‭NLT‬‬

“Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again—rejoice!”

‭‭Philippians‬ ‭4‬:‭4‬ ‭NLT‬‬

“For the Kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭14‬:‭17‬ ‭NLT‬‬

“So go ahead. Eat your food with joy, and drink your wine with a happy heart, for God approves of this!”

‭‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭9‬:‭7‬ ‭NLT‬‬

“You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy.”

‭‭1 Peter‬ ‭1‬:‭8‬ ‭NLT‬‬

“I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭15‬:‭13‬ ‭NLT‬‬

These are not the only scriptures that talk about Joy in the Bible and I think that proves that God truly cares about us and wants us to be joyful. Sometimes I can get in the mindset of feeling guilty about being joyful. Sometimes I feel that if I get too excited that it’s too good to be true and that something bad is going to happen. I know for a fact that that thought is simply from the enemy, wanting to strip from us the Joy that God has given us. The enemy doesn’t want to see us joyful. He wants us to miss out on God’s blessing because he knows just how good they are. 

I’m not saying that it’s bad to feel upset or down, God understands that we have emotions. Jesus felt the same emotions that we feel today because he is a man and lived on this Earth just like us. He is 100% God and 100% Man. I just want to make it known that it’s okay to be joyful even when it seems like you shouldn’t be. It’s a gift from our Heavenly Father.

I am excited for 2023. I want to go into this new year filled with joy regardless of my circumstances. Many new things will be happening in 2023. I am so excited to graduate from college and have new experiences. I refuse to let the enemy fill me with anxiety as I enter a new stage in my life. I will be joyful because I trust that God has my best interest in mind. I hope your 2023 can be filled with joy as well.

PS. I decided to make a vision board and make it the cover photo for this blog post! I hope you can gather some inspiration from it. It has some of my goals and some inspiration pictures.

Thank you so much for reading.

Kindly,

Kayla