That They Might Have Joy
By Braddon Damien White
I was twenty-two the first time that phrase actually landed.
Adam fell that men might be, and men are, that they might have joy.
I’d heard it a hundred times before that — grown up with it, the way you grow up with the furniture in a house you’ve never really looked at. But this time it wasn’t furniture. It was the only thing in the room.
The room, at the time, was small. I had come home from my mission, gone back to BYU, and started quietly falling apart in the particular way you fall apart when you’ve known something about yourself since childhood and spent every year since trying to bury it deeper. I’d known I was gay before I had a word for it. I knew it the way you know weather is coming — not as an idea, but as a pressure. And I had done what I’d been taught to do with pressure like that: push it down, keep pushing, and trust that if I pushed hard enough and prayed hard enough, it would eventually stop pushing back.
It didn’t stop. It never does. Eventually I told my bishop, and the counsel that came back was gentle in tone and narrow in shape: focus on scripture, focus on prayer. Six months of that. Six months of staying away from the chat rooms where I might have found other people like me, steering clear of anything that might tempt me toward the thing I was trying to bury, filling the space instead with scripture at dawn and prayer at night — trying to read my way and pray my way out of being exactly who I already was.
Somewhere in those six months, I read that verse again, and this time it did something the hundred readings before it hadn’t done. It said, plainly, that the entire purpose of existing was joy. Not obedience. Not endurance. Not the careful management of a self you’d been told was a problem to be solved. Joy — stated as the reason Adam fell, the reason any of us are here at all.
And I remember the exact shape of the thought that followed, because it arrived almost too simply: if the purpose of existing is joy, and I am miserable in the precise shape of my own suppression, then something about this equation is broken — and it isn’t the equation.
I want to be careful here, because this wasn’t a moment of triumphant self-acceptance. It didn’t feel like liberation. It felt like the floor tilting very slightly under something I’d built my whole life on top of. But it was the first crack of light I’d let in, and it came from inside the very framework I was trying to use against myself. I hadn’t found some outside argument to justify who I was. I’d found it in the same book, the same verse-numbering, the same tradition that had spent six months asking me to disappear.
That’s the part I didn’t understand yet at twenty-two, and wouldn’t understand for a long time: that a true thing can live inside an old container without needing the container’s permission. I didn’t reject everything I’d been raised inside. Most of it I’ve since set down, some of it I’ve reshaped into something that’s mine now in language that’s mine now — but that one phrase I never had to reshape at all. It was already saying the thing I needed. I just hadn’t been ready to read it plainly.
There’s a difference — I’ve come to think of it more clearly over the years — between happiness and joy. Happiness, most of the time, waits on circumstance. It arrives when things go well and leaves when they don’t, and you can’t build much of a life standing on something that leaves. Joy is not like that. Joy is closer to what Viktor Frankl found in a place with almost nothing left to be happy about — the discovery that meaning isn’t handed to you by your circumstances, it’s constructed inside them, actively, deliberately, sometimes against them. Joy asks something of you. It asks you to be honest about who’s actually living your life. Happiness can survive on a performance. Joy can’t.
I couldn’t have said any of that at twenty-two. What I had instead was a single sentence and the beginning of a compass — the first true bearing I ever took on my own life. Existence is for something. That something is joy. Joy requires being real. Therefore being real is not the failure I’d been told it was. It’s the assignment.
It would be twenty-nine years before I formalized any of that into something with a name. Twenty-nine years of living by that bearing without ever writing it down as a framework, without knowing the word “resonance” would one day carry what that verse had first carried for me alone in a room at BYU. The seed doesn’t need the framework to be real. It only needs somewhere to keep growing, quietly, for as long as it takes.
I still hold that verse close, even though I’m no longer active in the tradition that gave it to me. That isn’t contradiction. It’s just what happens when something true outlives the room it was born in — you don’t have to burn the room down to keep the thing that mattered. You just carry it forward, in your own words, until it fits the life you’re actually living.
If you’re reading this and you have a phrase like that — a sentence, a memory, a single line that landed once and never quite let go, even though you can’t yet say what it means or where it’s leading — you don’t need to have it figured out. You don’t need a framework yet. You don’t need thirty years to have passed. You only need to keep it. Some seeds take decades. That doesn’t mean they aren’t already becoming something.
Adam fell that men might be.
Men are, that they might have joy.