James E. McReynolds

James McReynolds is one incredible human being. It is hard to believe that any human mind could brim so constantly with wonderful thoughts and ideas. Every book that Jim writes seems to bristle with countless brilliant observations and quotable quotes.

Each volume is a great big, gorgeous bonfire burning in the dark of night and emitting sparks in every direction, suddenly and often illuminating the landscape and revealing things the reader had never imagined.

When I learned that Jim had written this book about grace, I had trouble believing he had done it. Grace is such a hackneyed subject in most Christians’ experience. Every minister I know has preached sermon after sermon on the topic, almost always without saying anything new or fresh about it. What could this author possibly say about it now that hasn’t been said thousands of times before?

I should have known better. Jim has amazed me with almost every book he has written. His mind is an incredible reservoir of facts and ideas that invariably seem to shatter the night with their incredible freshness and brilliance.

Chapter after chapter, he offers pungent remarks and illustrations to illustrate an old, familiar subject, and to leave the reader shaking his or her head and saying, “Wow! That is brilliant! or, “That is something I never thought of!”

This is a fascinating book because the author himself is so fascinating as a person and a preacher. It is fun and exciting to read because James McReynolds is such an eclectic thinker. I doubt if he ever starts a page knowing where it will take him; he simply starts writing and lets the thoughts transport him wherever they will.

 Happily, his thoughts fall all over the place, like seeds blown about by a beautiful wind, and invariably impregnate the soil around them with carefully chosen quotations, allusions and random ideas.

 I frankly have known of no other writer, preacher, teacher, counselor or otherwise, whose mind is so unbelievably rife with delightful and personal observations

 Whatever you paid for your copy of the book or however you obtained, you are in for an incredible journey as the pages unfold before your eyes.

God is glorified…

…in ordinary people. We look on the thankless and monotonous moments as roadblocks. Ordinary days are not an interruption. They are miracles. God places human beings in so many places. God chose where you were born before your birth. We glorify God in the simplest ways.

When my friend John Killinger suggested writing a book on the magic of being ordinary, I knew he meant not just how to go from ordinary to extraordinary, but the reverse.

When we hear the word ordinary, it brings the impression about something not only common, but unnoticed, small, or unimportant. Most people think they must get away from such an existence. The ordinary kind of life is not worthy of our thoughts.

Killinger would say we should never run away from the magic of being ordinary. We don’t escape the insignificant. We miss the most significant. We lose our smallness and our greatness. There is magic in being ordinary. We are the work of the Master Creator. The correct understanding of the word is that we are wonders. We are one of billions of humans, and yet each one is unique.

Instead of sitting down and waiting for life to become extraordinary, we need to take control to start finding joy in the ordinary. Make the world a better place by serving others, the whole community, and all that we touch. My wife volunteers at the community food bank. Whatever you do, be the change. Helping others is a double win.

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The Rev. Dr. James McReynolds is founder of Visionquests for Joy International. He provides spiritual encounters in local churches, hospitals, colleges and schools of higher education, prisons, businesses, and civic organizations. He lives in Elmwood, Nebraska.

Wow! Here we are, in the middle of a universal pandemic that doesn’t seem to ever want to go away, with a heinous way still raging in Ukraine, with widespread financial and maintenance problems here and everywhere, and people are committing suicide because of it. And my friend James was writing a book on peace.

It is important and appropriate. Those are the reason to think about the peace of God right now. Consider the meaning of the peace that passes all understanding, the peace that comes from trusting God, and knowing that God will make everything all right in this moment. All these troubles keep ascending on every side of us.

-from the Foreword by John Killinger

The Rev. Dr. James McReynolds is founder of Visionquests for Joy International.  He provides spiritual encounters in local churches, hospitals, colleges and schools of higher education, prisons, businesses, and civic organizations. He lives in Elmwood, Nebraska.

A seasoned preacher writes about his joy of preaching.

For years now, I have had a gentleman’s agreement to write the forewords for my old student and colleague James McReynolds’ remarkable books.

I had some misgivings about my own ability to offer a forward to a book on the fruit of self-control. Self-control and patience has never been a problem for me.

When I look back across the years, I cannot remember a single time, from my childhood to old age, when I struggled with this issue. It was simply not a matter that I dealt with.

Maybe it was because I grew up under a volatile father who would have punished me harshly if I acted up at any time. Perhaps it was because I have such a irenic personality that on those few occasions when I needed to become umbrageous over something happening in my vicinity that I just did not have enough taste for combat to even thinking of engaging in it.

One evening when as I was watching one of the daily news problems I usually watch, I was stuck by all the terrible things going on in our world: the dreadful wars in Europe and in the Middle East, Vladimir Putin’s scary and unseemly lust for power and dominance, the Chinese penchant for technical supremacy, the escalating violence in our own inner cities and the corresponding arrogance of the gun lobbies at a time when gun control seems to be an impossible dream. In a flash, I realized that these are all convincing evidence of an overwhelming need for self-control everywhere, not just in our individual lives, but in the world at large.

If everybody had only learned to exercise self-control over their own thoughts and actions, we would not be in the mess we are in. People would not have gone to war because they had the impulse to do it or violated their neighbor’s territory and personal safety because it seemed to a justifiable thing to do. There would have been a lot more restraint shown on every side. Everybody would have preferred peace and kindness to the sort of problem of madness and mayhem that have become the rule in our society.

So Jim I now apologize for thinking that I had nothing to say on the matter of self-control. I do. I just do not really know what to say or where to say it effectively.

Perhaps I should begin by merely thinking about this subject and praying for its most egregious violators to somehow come to the realization that a world gone mad is not what any of us really want after all. We must amend the situation by exercising more self-control in their realms.

I could single out one or two people that I know who are violating the love-thy-neighbor rule right now and try to think how I could help them to harness their own actions and desires. Maybe I could write an opinion editorial on this problem to be published in the local newspapers.

In fact, I am moved to write a new book myself entitled Growing Old Is the Hardest Work You Will Ever Do. I believe that.

These are a few things I could do that might produce positive results in the part of the world closest to myself and help these persons to change everything for the better in our own proximity.

One thing I know for sure, this issue needs to become a big movement in our world today as it has always been for generations past. We must go beyond the desire for more peace and equanimity in our own life environment.

I can sympathize with Roger who died at age 90. I am now 91. I am writing a new book, Growing Old Is the Hardest Work You Will Ever Do.

I believe it. It isn’t easy. If you don’t think so, just wait until you do it. All life is a struggle, and the gets harder as we age. Our bodies give us lots of trouble. Our minds do not function as well as they once did. Existence in general tends to become more difficult. If we think we had trouble along the way, we just had to reach old age is unbelievably difficult. What we once experienced as child’s play compared to what comes later.

My wife Gloria, who is several years younger than I, does most of our driving now. I often just sit at Walmart and watch the stream of people while she does the shopping. Many of the customers keep up needed household duties. Many are older and have great difficulty moving among the cars to get a basket and lean on that while they push around the store itself. How courageous just be out there! I feel guilty that I just sit there watching them as they struggle. It is extremely important that we finishing our course with God. We must let the divine hand shape our final days as it has enabled us to shape our lives along the way.

Life at any age continues to be an enigma to us. This is true in out latter years than at any time in our earthly pilgrimage. If we have ever needed God, it is surely now.

Jim has started something by writing his remarkable book. Now, it is up to us, his readers and publishers, to strive to create a more harmonious and cooperative world. This is the goal for finishing well for individuals and generations now and to come to complete their lives with grace, love, and joy.

John R. Killinger

Warrenton, Virginia

I have never known anyone so obsessed with the subject of joy as my old friend James McReynolds. When I read his books about joy, I have the feeling that his whole being is somehow absorbed in his one great human emotion.

His writings simply exude the perpetual excitement he experiences at merely contemplating the subject. His scholarly approach will contribute to infamy as years from now his work will holds its value.

I envy that. Jim must live continuously on the verge of tingling and shouting at the mention of the word. He is indeed a “joyologist,” as he has styled himself.

He is someone whole life has been devoted to and absorbed in his one vitally important human emotion. Apparently, Jim and his wife Laurel live in a constant state of enjoyment. They become instantly excitable at the thought of it.

Their home must glow with a special aura. I can’t imagine what it would be like living next to one of the world’s great generators, so that the atmosphere would hum with the power and energy emitted by their love and excitement.

Jim’s readers can feel this. They can sense it after reading even a page or two of his latest book. The emotion is almost beyond infectious. Sharing his joy permeates the entire atmosphere of the words as they arise from the paper on which they are printed.          

~John Killinger

 James E. McReynolds is a preacher, teacher, author, coach, and retreat leader who shares the joy of the Lord. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He lives in Elmwood, Nebraska.

Jim McReynolds has done it again! He has filled another book from cover to cover with sheer, unadulterated joy. This man is a marvel. He truly is. I really believe he could be confined in a straitjacket, strapped in a briar-studded, hard, and unyielding chair in some subterranean prison with an unforgiving noise level produced by constantly thudding jackhammers and screaming air-whistles, and still think about how wonderfully joyous it all is.

Age has not dimmed his voice or quelled his spirit.

Now in his 80s, Jim is more devoted than ever to this ever-recurring theme in all his writings, that no matter how desperate our circumstances or how mitigated our pleasures, there is an indefinable, insuperable joy at the heart of human existence, and we are grossly remiss if we fail to note it and celebrate it with every heart’s breath we take.

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be Laurel McReynolds and to married to this fantastically positive and celebrate eternal joy. The illustrious Norman Vincent Peale, author of the perennially best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking, was right, all those years ago, when he heard Jim preach a sermon, anointed him the Minister of Joy to the World. It took one to know one, and Peale was nothing if he was not the great drum major of joyful, creative thinking from his pulpit on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Perhaps Laurel, who has served Jim’s meals and helped to keep his house or what now proved years on end.

Perhaps one day she would favor us with a book of her own, or at least an article, in which she describes what it has been like to share a home with this irrepressible genius of the eternal joyful attitude. Laurel is a joy herself, reflecting in her personality and face the supernal glow from her love for God who gives eternal joy. - From the Foreword by John Killinger

James E. McReynolds is a preacher, teacher, author, coach, and retreat leader who shares the joy of the Lord. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He lives in Elmwood, Nebraska.

A study of Biblical Joy

Richard Niebuhr said of faith: “Faith is the attitude of the self in its existence toward all existences that surround it, as being relied upon or to be suspected. It is the attitude that appears in all the wariness and confidence of life as it moves about among the living. It is fundamentally trust or distrust in the being itself.” (H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, p. 118)

People have suffered and enjoyed, lost and won, doubted and believed, regressed and progressed on their faith journey. Ask anyone who has faith, has known doubt. Christian writers possess quiet confidence. This writer sees faith as the complete trust in the God of the gospels. Each human experience is different, but the points of trust as the same.

 Failure Is an Invitation to Faith

 We shun failure because we fear that revealing our weaknesses and imperfections will cause us to be unacceptable, unlovable, and of no use, unmarketable. Failure exposes our vulnerability. Failure is part of humanity. Being human challenges us to recognize life as a gift. Difficulties and failures have essential things to offer us. Children learn to walk by trying, failing, and trying again.

Mistakes, errors, failures are ways to learn to live life more fully. God proceeds to stay with us when we are raw and vulnerable, moving in our being with deep care and gentleness. Failure can lead us to the light.

 We are more attentive when life is hard. Stretching our spirits, now worn and fragile from the pain of failure, we receive love and comfort. We must encounter failure. We need to embrace it. We always have and we always will. The earth where we exist, has been in existence for a long time. Humans have been around one-third as long as the universe. Earth’s story began about five billion years ago. More than 600 million years was taken for the earth’s crust to take shape. It too 300 million years more for the first signs of microbial life to begin. After numerous mass extinction events and 465million years later, mammals finally arrived.

Modern humans did not exist for another 70 million years. We humans first appeared about 300,000 years ago. During a public planetary talk, we learned that humans have only been on planet earth for 0.0067 per cent of its existence.

Humans were at first nomads. We learned to harness fire. Civilizations took shape. Unbelievably, humans have been on a meteoric trajectory, going from hunters to space wanderers in less than 6,000 years.

Trust and mistrust are ways we relate to our parents and others beginning early in life and running deeply all the years of our lives. I enjoyed Jennifer Lawrence’s movie, Joy. Lawrence plays a lovely young woman who believes in our self. She envisions and creates a simple mop. Nobody thinks it will ever be a success. She is strong and despite her many disappointments and pain, she gains faith and success. Failure was her friend. She acknowledge he failure without becoming trapped by it.

Reflection enables us to remain responsible, spiritual, emotional, and practical. Failure offers us an opportunity to look and ask and delve into who we are. How do we desire to live life. We don’t feel valued by our culture, church or community, or even ourselves. God’s love and grace helps us love ourselves. Loving ourselves includes struggling with jealousy and envy toward others whose lives appear easier and more successful than ours. We reflect alone and with others. Sharing experiences of failure with people who know and love us provides encouragement in our times of darkness.

To pray is to reflect the reality and truths about us, others, the world, and God. This does not mean possessing, having, or consuming. In prayer we encounter God intimately. God reminds us that we are precious. Isaiah 43:4-5.

Prayer provides solace in our pain. It quiet our spirits so we move past the surface answers and self-deception to hear the deepest desires of our souls. The power we have is the power of the spirit within us. Failure can bring relief.

If we know that we can never be perfect, we finally get off our backs. I am accepting of my gifts and my work and willing to try different and new things. We confuse incompleteness with failure. Our world is filled with instant gratification and the quick fix. We quickly use the label “failure.”

Failure reminds us to look back with gratitude for God’s faithfulness in the past. We look forward in anticipation to the eternal joy that can become ours. Failure invites us to gather bot the past and future into the present moment that we live fully and faithfully now.

The challenge of failure is for us to remain faithful despite our fears, in the middle of the grief, loss, and pain, embarrassment, insecurity, and disappointment.

 We become even further graced as we grow with compassion, wisdom, and love. If you think you have failed completely with no hope, please read this book, and give a copy to others.

Remember Jesus failed. We live on this side of the resurrection, so we miss the anguish and pain of the failure that proceeded it. The world would think that the life and ministry of Jesus were failures. He did not change the hearts of all those who heard him. He was not the type of messiah that brought the reign of God on earth. Jesus even failed to gain the complete loyalty of his disciples. They denied any association with him.

Jesus died as a common criminal. He died lonely, in much pain, ridiculed, and taunted. The challenge of faith and faithfulness is to hold that fruit of the Spirit within us, whatever life brings. That is the reality of faith.

Gentleness is infectious. I could feel the thought of it affecting my very mood and spirit as I read the early, unpublished pages of this book for the first time.

We live in a warring, contentious world where most people think they must struggle to survive. Sometimes it does seem to be that kind of world, with people always choosing sides and arguing with others about what we should think and how we should behave. This is a particularly fractious time in our national history, when everybody seems to feel that he or she must enlist in this or that cause and oppose certain ideas or ways of thinking that others are expressing so forcibly.

I have felt it and so have you.

The Rev. Dr. James McReynolds is founder of Visionquests for Joy International.  He provides spiritual encounters in local churches, hospitals, colleges and schools of higher education, prisons, businesses, and civic organizations. He lives in Elmwood, Nebraska.

Somewhere in this book so sprawling with fresh ideas and thoughtful images, the author makes the statement that “Kindness is our natural state. The acting of kindness allows us to find a deep and profound connection.”

“A deep and profound connection.”

How true that is, and how important! We are not designed to live alone, to exist in isolation from other human beings. Most of us spend our lives trying to find meaningful connections with others, to become part of the whole of human existence. And, almost miraculously, when we are kind to others, we are making those connections.

This our “natural state,” the author writes, the state where we truly belong, where our souls always have a place, where they find the real joy and fullness of their own existence. I never thought of that before reading the manuscript of this exceptional volume. I know that it is very true. I shall always be greatly indebted to James McReynolds for bringing it so forcefully to my attention.

He is indeed, as Dr. Norman Vincent Peale once anointed him as the Minister of Joy to the World.

John R. Killinger

Warrenton, Virginia

The Rev. Dr. James McReynolds is founder of Visionquests for Joy International. He provides spiritual encounters in local churches, hospitals, colleges and schools of higher education, prisons, businesses, and civic organizations. He lives in Elmwood, Nebraska.

Longsuffering. We’re not good at it, are we? We usually know what we want, and we want it now. Not tomorrow, not the next day, not sometime in the future. NOW, in screaming immediacy.

My wife Gloria and I had a long visit this afternoon with some of her grandchildren and their children. One of those children, a cute little toddler named Kaizen, is four years old and accustomed to having his way—and having it when he wants it

He is well accustomed to turning up his volume to unpleasant levels if he isn’t getting it, so the parents usually let him have it. “No, Kaizen,” they say, “you can’t have that,” or “You can’t do that.” But then the din begins, and they soon weaken and capitulate.

It happen again and again. First, he was denied, but he soon was placated. And sadly, most children today are that way. It is easy to predict what they will be like as adolescents and young adults.

So this excellent book is a timely one. Extremely. And is in fact overdue.

My overwhelming impression, as I read it in manuscript form, was that it simple oozes with patience—and learning to delay one’s gratification with developing an ability to hang on through things for the long haul, with developing the capacity to wait, to endure, and eventually to overcome.

Ours is not a waiting culture, unfortunately. It is always hurrying to get somewhere, to acquire whatever is desired, to reach its goals from the very moment they are identified.

Why is this? It wasn’t this way when I was just a boy—though that was many years ago. People used to be a lot more patient. They understood that they had to wait and pray and work for the things they wanted or needed.

My mother wanted a dishwashing machine, but our family lived in three different homes before she finally got one.

I remember how proud of it she was, and how she loved to show it to her neighbors and to hear them say how wonderful it was, especially when many of them stood longing for the ones they hoped someday to possess.

Life is not that way any longer. Now the credit unions and production companies have persuaded most of us as that we don’t have to wait, that whatever we want is ours the minute we can conceive of having the object of our irresistible desire delivered to our door before we can say, “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.”

This book is about tempering our resolves, learning to wait patiently in the midst of rushing, never temperament world, and finding joy and meaning in the self-control it advises us to develop.

The author concludes that it has to do with “being fully human.” I like that. We discover our deep and true humanity as we learn to control our impulses and let life flow peacefully and uninterruptedly around us, without giving way to the feverishness of society and the harried pace of a world gone mad.

I confess I needed this book and its reminder of how life and desire can so easily spin out of control when we don’t resolve to wait and observe and let things unfold at their own pace, without any help or impetus from us. I have really needed to slow down and smell the roses.

I needed to let my journey to unfold at its own deliberate pace, and to enjoy the love, the friendships and the opportunities it brings in its own sweet time.

I’ll be better able to do it now.

This book says that, in the end, it’s all about love—about waiting and savoring existence and counting our blessings. Life is full and beautiful without being pushed and tormented to yield its blessings before their time.

“God so loved the world”—and God has given us settings of untold beauty and value, if we only have the patience to see them.

I believe that. And now that I have this wonderful book to return to from time to time, I shall be much better to remember it and to live by it.

Dr. John R. Killinger, Warrenton, Virginia

Jim’s books have a way of arresting my thoughts and causing me to listen. He never fails to invite us to come alongside as he becomes aware of the presence of God.

For years I have loved his words. McReynolds writes from a deep faith, forged in the fires of love. Unlike other writers that I have read, he offers no formulas, but assures the reader that God understands and meets us as we are.

While going through times of uncertainty, Jim’s words brought me comfort and courage to move forward with my life. This book helped me to see purpose and joy even when life passes us by at a rapid pace.

A life of worshipping is a life that lets God love us. We know God’s presence with us and draw closer to loving God even with our human limitations.

I certainly did.

Thomas A. Martin

Retired Presbyterian Minister

James E. McReynolds is a preacher, teacher, author, coach, and retreat leader who shares the joy of the Lord. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He lives in Elmwood, Nebraska.

Walking with God in the Garden

In this beautiful book, which is about gardens and beauty and joy, he leads us at last to a chapter on jouissance, a French word for extreme and ultimate joy. It is where he is headed in his life journey all these years.

I know his readers will find themselves transported to this wonderful heart of joy with him, for his very language reflects on every page his adoration of God and what it means to live with the Divine throbbing through every bit of the universe.

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be Jim and to live constantly with this vibrancy at the very center of my entire being.

If anybody was ever prepared to enter heaven, it is Jim. I can’t believe that he will find life any richer or more beautiful when he gets there than it was before he left the earth. If anyone ever lived with what one old hymn called “the foretaste of glory,” it is he. This book is radiant proof of it!

John Killinger

Warrenton, Virginia

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James McReynolds is a preacher, teacher, author, coach, and retreat leader who shares the joy of the Lord. He is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ. He lives in Elmwood, Nebraska.