Finding Joy Today, Not Just ‘Someday’

There’s a note on your phone titled “Someday,” the trip you’ll take, the house you’ll finally furnish properly, the dinner parties you’ll host with the good dishes, all filed under a future that starts once you’re not single anymore. Meanwhile this morning’s coffee is going cold on the counter while you scroll past the note, because today didn’t make the list. Today is just the thing you’re getting through on the way to someday.

A Song Written by Someone Who Had Genuinely Suffered

Psalm 118 is a psalm of thanksgiving, likely sung at temple worship to celebrate deliverance from real, near-fatal danger. Just a few verses before our anchor verse, the psalmist describes being pushed hard enough to fall, surrounded by enemies, disciplined severely, brought close to death. This isn’t a psalm written by someone with an easy, trouble-free life declaring how great everything is. It’s written by someone who has been through something genuinely hard, and who still lands, deliberately, on this declaration:

“This is the day that Yahweh has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24, WEB)

Notice the specificity: not “there will be a day,” not “someday will come when we rejoice,” but this day, the actual, ordinary day the psalmist is standing in when he writes it, hardship and all. The joy isn’t contingent on the hardship being resolved first. It’s a choice made in the middle of an unresolved story, about a day that already belongs to God regardless of what it contains.

The Trap of Someday Joy

Here’s the danger of a someday list: it quietly trains you to treat every day currently in front of you as a placeholder rather than a gift. If joy is something you’re only allowed to access once your relationship status changes, you could spend years, even decades, deferring the actual enjoyment of your one life, waiting for a future date to unlock it. Think about how many ordinary, genuinely good days have already passed you by half-noticed because your attention was fixed on the day that hasn’t come yet, a beautiful autumn afternoon spent scrolling instead of walking outside, a birthday celebrated with real friends but privately measured against the birthday you imagine having someday instead. And here’s the part that should give you pause: this habit doesn’t disappear the moment you get married. If you haven’t built the muscle of gratitude and joy in the present now, marriage won’t automatically install it. The goalpost simply moves, someday once we have kids, someday once we buy a house, someday once things settle down. Deferred joy is a pattern, not a phase, and it has to be interrupted deliberately, wherever you are.

This doesn’t mean pretending the ache of wanting marriage isn’t real, any more than the psalmist pretended his suffering wasn’t real. It means refusing to let that ache be the only thing determining whether today counts. Notice, too, that the psalmist doesn’t rejoice because his circumstances have fully resolved. The enemies mentioned earlier in the psalm haven’t vanished; the danger described is simply being looked back on, not erased. Joy here isn’t the reward for a finished story. It’s a response available in the middle of an ongoing one, which means it’s available to you today, in the middle of yours, whatever chapter you happen to be in. The psalmist’s declaration is an act of will as much as emotion, we will rejoice, a decision made in advance, not just a feeling that happened to arrive. Joy in singleness works the same way: it’s often a choice you make before you feel like making it, not a mood you wait to naturally show up.

This psalm was also written for corporate worship, meant to be declared out loud, together, by a whole community. That’s a clue worth taking seriously: joy in the present tends to grow best when it isn’t kept private. Someday-thinking often thrives in isolation, quietly compared against a mental highlight reel of what marriage will supposedly make possible. Saying “this is the day” out loud, to a friend, in a small group, at a dinner table, breaks that isolation and makes the gladness something shared rather than something you’re still waiting to earn the right to feel.

Moving Someday Into Today

Picture someone finally opening that Someday note and actually reading through it honestly. The trip to the coast she’s always wanted to take, she doesn’t need a companion for the first leg of it; she could go this fall, alone or with a friend. The good dishes she’s been saving in a box in the closet for a wedding that hasn’t happened, she could use them tonight, for herself, on an ordinary Tuesday. The dinner party she imagines hosting someday as a married woman, she could host four friends this month, in the apartment she already has, with the table she already owns.

None of these require a spouse. They only require a decision to stop waiting for permission to enjoy her own life. A man in a similar spot might realize he’s been putting off learning to cook a real meal for himself, treating his own kitchen as not worth the effort until there’s someone else to cook for, when the truth is a good meal, eaten slowly at his own table, was always worth the effort, married or not. This week, take one item off your own someday list and do it now, not as a consolation prize for still being single, but as an act of genuine gratitude for the specific day God has actually given you. This is the day the Lord has made. Not someday. This one, right now, exactly as it is.

Try saying it out loud tomorrow morning, before you check your phone, before the day has had a chance to prove itself one way or another: this is the day the Lord has made. Let the gladness be a decision first. Often, the feeling follows the decision rather than the other way around, and either way, the day itself is no less a gift for having to be chosen on purpose.

Reflect

1. What's on your personal "someday" list that you've been withholding from yourself until marriage?
2. What would it cost you, honestly, to enjoy your life today instead of treating today as a waiting period?
3. If gratitude and joy are habits, what habit are you currently building by constantly deferring both to someday?

A Prayer for Today

Lord, forgive me for treating today like a placeholder, for filing away joy under 'someday' as if this day doesn't count until my circumstances change. This is the day you have made, and I choose, by faith and not just feeling, to rejoice and be glad in it. Teach me to enjoy the ordinary gifts already in front of me, this morning, this meal, this friendship, instead of constantly deferring gladness to a future I can't control. Build in me a habit of gratitude now, so that whatever season comes next, I already know how to be glad in it. In Jesus' name, amen.

Your Action Step

Pick one item off your "someday" list and do it, or start it, this week, without waiting for marriage to make it worth doing.