“Even Black matriarchs will sing about this joy that they have. They were clear about their joy’s origins. The world did not give it to them. The world could not take it away.”

– From The Joy of the Disinherited

hen I think about joy, I often return to the rosebush in front of my grandmother Ella Mae’s yard. I wrote about it in “The Joy of the Disinherited,” a book inspired by Howard Thurman’s work. The title itself comes from Thurman’s classic, “Jesus and the Disinherited.”

It was only after encountering Thurman’s writing that I began to truly understand the power of sitting still and doing the deep, internal reflective work he described as performing surgery on the psyche. His words helped me name the quiet inner wrestling that many of us carry. They helped me see how the condition of our inner lives shapes our ability to experience joy.

Season after season, that rosebush in Ella Mae’s yard stood in the same place. Some years, it bloomed with quiet, stubborn beauty. Other years, it sat bare, stripped by weather and time. Yet whether it was full or empty, whether life was visible or hidden beneath the surface, it remained. It was constant.

Around Mother’s Day, the roses always seemed to bloom at the right moment, almost like a promise kept. We would clip them and bring them to the mothers gathered at my grandmother’s home after church. Those simple moments have stayed with me because they capture the essence of joy. Joy is often quiet and steady. It is easy to overlook and profoundly real.

It has not always felt like that rosebush for me. Several years ago, I slipped into an arresting depression, and I had to slowly fight my way back to joy, to the joy I feared had left me.

I struggled to understand that joy is steady. I struggled to understand that joy is rooted. I struggled to understand that joy remains even when everything around me feels uncertain.

There was a moment when I realized that joy was not something I could create through sheer effort. I tried to pray my way to joy, convinced that God had abandoned me, drifting in and out of pleas for God to show me what I had done wrong. But joy did not come as a reward for spiritual performance. It revealed itself as the quiet and steady assurance that God had been with me all along.

It took me a while to understand that this kind of joy does not come from circumstances but from God himself. The older I get, the more I see that joy becomes possible because of who God is. Joy rises from the truth that God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. These are not abstract theological ideas. They are the grounding truths that allow us to stand. They are an inheritance passed down through the generations, much like the rosebush that kept showing up year after year. Joy becomes the quiet strength that reminds us that God has not left us. Joy becomes the reminder that we are held by the character of God, even when life looks bare.

Still, I must admit that sometimes joy must be fought for. The realities of daily life can make joy feel far away. When you are navigating challenges at work or carrying the weight of a strained relationship or worrying about your children, joy can seem like something other people talk about but that you cannot touch.

And when you lift your eyes to the wider world, the heaviness grows. We are living through a time marked by fear, uncertainty, and deep division. Families are stretched thin. Communities are fraying. Many people feel unsteady. These realities are not small. They touch how we move through each day.

This is why we must never confuse joy with happiness. Happiness rises and falls with circumstances. Joy does not. Faith does not ask us to deny what is happening around us. Joy does not require us to ignore reality. Joy grows from the truth that, despite what is happening in our individual and collective lives, we can rest because who God is does not change. The world will do its best to convince us that joy is not possible. Yet joy is especially available to believers. And it does not matter your faith tradition, because every faith tradition points back to a God who knows all, sees all, and holds all power.

This is why joy remains possible even when life is difficult.

Joy becomes our inheritance. It becomes a rosebush in winter and in spring. It becomes the quiet reminder that what looks bare is still alive. It becomes the truth that steadies us when life is uncertain. It becomes the evidence that God has not left us.

The path to joy is deeply personal. Many of us know what it means to have our experience in this world deny us of our core truths — that we are loved and that we are worthy. Oppression has a way of reshaping our identities in its own shadow. It can distort how we see ourselves and what we believe is possible.

This makes Howard Thurman’s wisdom essential when writing about the delicate surgery of the psyche that the disinherited must undergo to reclaim their full humanity. This work matters because joy is not separate from identity. Joy grows when we recover the truth about who we are and whose we are. When we return to that inward center, we discover that joy was never gone. Joy was simply waiting for us to remember.