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| On A Recent Visit To Valhalla |
After a summer internship at Gospel Recordings, I was drawn to the fact that perhaps this was my place for this time.
I have chosen to highlight my acquaintance with Joy Ridderhof as she highly influenced my life. She had the ability to inspire one to be joyful and rejoice. She was a constant reminder to rejoice and frequently asked:
"Are you practicing rejoicing? Remember, the hard things make good rejoicing practice."
What made her special to me, was not just her spirit of joy but she impressed it upon my mind that God is familiar with our needs.
She would periodically draw me aside and ask how I was doing and before I knew it the conversation evolved in prayer. It was the uncanny illusion that she had one foot on earth and the other in Heaven as you never knew when she would just start including God in the conversation. She took me on ride-a-longs, she stopped to play croquet with us young people.
As someone described : “Joy never stopped praising God, no matter what the trouble was. She believed that when the Bible said to rejoice it meant just that, no matter what was happening at the time. Her life and faith is a testimony of what God can do with someone who is humble and willing to follow His guidance—wherever it takes them. Even when it means driving in the dark through a river, trusting that there will be a road on the other side.”
One thing about Joy was that she understood cause she had been there too. "As all of her other sisters were married, she felt God’s plan was clear for her to return home to care for her widowed father. Upon arriving home she discovered that an old beau of hers, Francis, had not yet married either and was still interested in her. He began paying her visits, and on one particular visit, he spoke to her about marriage. Whatever exchange happened between the two, Francis left thinking Joy was refusing him, and Joy was left not understanding that he wanted to marry her or, at the very least, not being sure he meant it. She decided that she did love him and wanted to marry him, and that she would tell him the next time he brought it up. A short time later they both attended a Christian camp, and Joy anxiously waited for Francis to approach her. To her dismay he spent the entire weekend avoiding her and keeping company with another girl. She was devastated and confused. Around the same time her father announced that he was remarrying. Reeling from the shock, Joy found that what she thought had been God’s plan for her life, being a wife to Francis and a nursemaid to her father, was not His plan at all." ~as written and told
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