What Three and a Half Years of Praying for My Daughter Taught Me About Joy

I’ve spent more early mornings than I’d like to admit running through my mental to-do list instead of just breathing in the gift of another sunrise, so when I found a writer who names that tension and hands me a way through it, I paid attention. Monica Ritchie refuses to let faith become one more checklist, choosing instead to walk through lament, rest, and fasting like a friend who’s done the hard, slow work herself. It’s a joy to welcome Monica to the farm’s front porch today…

Guest Post by Monica Ritchie

There have been dozens of times I’ve walked past someone I know and, almost like a reflex, said, “Hi, how are you?” When they answer, “Good! And you?” I give the same automatic reply back.

We’ve all done this.

It’s a passable exchange for the produce aisle, but it will not pass with God.

Paul tells us to “rejoice always,” and for a long time I wondered what that really meant.

Was it enough to seem fine in a passing conversation? Is happiness even the same thing as joy?

“Chasing a feeling like happiness has a way of teaching us to settle for shallow, surface-level exchanges, even with God.“

I once watched a hashtag rack up over fourteen million posts, all promising happiness right now. But the reality of the world is that tragedy strikes and suffering exists, so it’s natural that we won’t always feel joyful. Chasing a feeling like happiness has a way of teaching us to settle for shallow, surface-level exchanges, even with God.

If you’re wondering how anyone finds real peace in the middle of real suffering, I think of Horatio Spafford. He lost his son to illness, his wealth to the Great Chicago Fire, and then all four of his daughters when the ship carrying them across the Atlantic sank. He is said to have written these words over the very waters where they drowned:

“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way, 

when sorrows like sea billows roll; 

whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, 

it is well, it is well with my soul.“

“That kind of faith isn’t born from pretending everything is fine. It’s born from lament.“

That kind of faith isn’t born from pretending everything is fine. It’s born from lament.

To lament is to be honest with God about your feelings, especially when you’re carrying more grief than your arms alone can hold. On the cross, Jesus himself echoed the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That is some serious honesty.

I learned to practice lament in the years after my daughter was born, when she suffered from an autoimmune disease for the first three and a half years of her life. I prayed and cried out my feelings of forsakenness, loneliness, and desperation the whole time. “Where is her healing?” I would ask God. “And where, oh God, are you?”

After every dedicated time of lament, I would leave with a measure of peace. But it never lasted as long as I wanted it to, so I’d go back and lament again. Lament isn’t a box you check once. It’s a discipline you return to, over and over, if you want a faith that actually endures.

“Self-sufficiency tells God we’d rather manage on our own. The antidote to self-sufficiency is humility, and the path to humility is paved through lament.”

I think of how my own kids behave when I’ve been away from them for a day. Their caretaker always tells me how well-behaved they were. Then I walk back in the door, and suddenly there are tantrums. Why? Because I’m the parent they trust the most. They know that no matter how they act, I’m not going anywhere.

That’s the posture we take toward God when we lament. We hand him our most vulnerable, least composed selves, and we trust him to hold us anyway.

Self-sufficiency tells God we’d rather manage on our own. The antidote to self-sufficiency is humility, and the path to humility is paved through lament.

David shows us this all through Psalm 109, pouring out his rawest emotions and begging God to show up. And by the end of that same psalm, something shifts. David moves from complaint, to petition, to praise: “With my mouth I will greatly extol the Lord.” That kind of ending only happens when we’ve been honest enough to let God all the way in.

God is not a Father who tells us to stuff our feelings down tight.

He meets our pain with arms tender enough to hold every bit of it. As we bring him our fear and our weakness instead of our performance, he fills us with strength and endurance.

This is how we actually become free from being ruled by our emotions—not by suppressing what we feel, but by bringing every hurt, every fear, every unanswered question straight to him in lament.

That is how we make room for a joy that doesn’t depend on everything being fine.

And once we’ve practiced that kind of honesty, we find that joy hums quietly beneath the surface, a steady anchor of strength, no matter what the day brings.

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