Over a recent weekend, an Indy FM station played Christmas music around the clock to help bring listeners some hope and joy.
Someone might say, “How can you talk about joy at a time like this?” I would answer, “What better time to remind ourselves that joy is what we were made for?”
The experience we call joy does not depend upon trouble-free circumstances. Rather, it is something distilled from a strange mixture of challenge, risk and hope. Challenge means that something is required or demanded of us. Risk means that the potential exists for failure or loss. Hope means that the possibility for a better future exists.
Without challenge, there can be no newness. Life remains mundane, predictable and manageable, but also disengaging, boring, stagnant and eventually intolerable.
Without risk, there is no energy. The mind may have its reasons, but the heart remains detached. What is currently possessed has arrived by mere chance or pity. A soul may be satiated without any real satisfaction.
Without hope, there is just nostalgia and regret. The good and bad of the past becomes something we clutch and defend at the expense of what could be.
When God sees that His child needs to experience a renewal of joy, God challenges him or her, usually in the form of an obstacle or threat that calls the child to respond: order needs to be restored, beauty needs to be preserved, truth needs to be affirmed.
God also calls His child to accept a new responsibility or take up one that has been neglected by others. Something personal is at stake (comfort, social standing, personal freedom, etc.)
God enlightens the child by opening his or her heart to the better thing coming to the world and invites the person to welcome it (i.e., hope).
How does this result in the experience called joy? We become a participant in something bigger than our own agendas. We move off the safe center and feel the dangerous places. We look around and see a difference made because of our involvement. When challenge comes, instead of running away or defending the status quo at all costs, we risk what is needed in the hope that God is creating a better future for and through us.
God himself experienced this path to joy in the earthly life of Jesus: “For the joy that was set before him, He [Christ] endured the cross, despising its shame, and is set down at the right hand of the Father” (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus did not have joy because of his power to calm storms and raise the dead. His joy became complete as he embraced the cross and risked his life (“Why have you forsaken me?”) for the redemption of those who mattered to Him and His Father (“It is finished!”)
To the extent that we know that God has our times in His hands, that God has placed certain moments into our hands, and nothing can separate us from the love of God, we will experience joy.
May Christ’s prayer be greatly fulfilled in us today: “These things I speak in the world so that they may have my joy made full in themselves” (John 17:13).
Russel Jarvis has lived in Hancock County since 1989 and has served as the lead chaplain at Hancock Regional Hospital since August 2003. This weekly column is written by local clergy members. Send comments to [email protected].
