Today we celebrated the 3rd Sunday in Advent, the Sunday of Joy. I automatically started singing the little song we learned in Sunday School many years ago, "I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart." [Insert your most screeching, annoying voice] "Where?" "Down in my heart!" But it occurred to me, that so many of my recent Christmases and I'm sure for so many, this Christmas, the joy is hard to come by. Sure I may have joy down in my heart, but it's pretty deep down there and it's covered by a lot of junk the world has thrown at me.
So how can this whole joy thing be real for so many when joy seems so deeply buried under lots of hurt and pain? I can't speak for others, but I know that a couple years ago, I was just done acting like I was good, things were okay, and I was happy about Christmas. It was Christmas Eve and my joy had gone out the window about a week prior as our new bathroom renovation was all for naught and the tub started leaking again through the roof of our living room. I was frustrated because we had seemed to make a number of financial mistakes that year and this was just another point showing how we didn't get what we paid for. Add to that some post-partum depression and it was just the perfect storm at Christmas time.
Brad and I usually lead the Christmas Eve service together, but the thought of doing that on this Christmas Eve when everything had gone wrong, felt like the most fake thing I could do. I didn't even want to show up and pretend things were fine when they weren't. So I called him with about 10 minutes to go before service and told him I couldn't do it. I wasn't going to show up and answer "Fine" when everyone asked "how are you?". This is what this whole holiday season feels like for so many. While some find it joyful, for those that don't, it's almost worse because you feel guilty for not being entranced by the "magic of the season".
And then there's this week of Advent, the week of joy. Joy means, "A feeling of great pleasure and happiness" but that wasn't me that Christmas. There wasn't a lot that gave me any kind of happiness. What kind of person can't even enjoy this holiday through their child's eyes? No one really had a good answer to that. To make it worse, I was the pastor's wife and with that comes some pressure (whether self-imposed or just unspoken) to have it together. Unfortunately for this pastor's wife, I'm completely and utterly human. That means that depression and anxiety and awful things happening in life don't pass me up for someone else. Christmas was sad that year, I was sad that year.
I have a few years between me and that Christmas, and I realized that trying to be perfect and act like everything was perfect was sucking the little bit of joy there was out of Christmas. Advent is this time of waiting for the big thing to happen. After all, Jesus is coming, but waiting is hard. I can give you several examples using my children as the subjects to demonstrate that waiting even for a short time is excruciating. And if we are waiting on joy, the wait can be more painful as each day passes.
Maybe that's why we have to celebrate hope and peace before we can get to joy. Because I don't think we can have true joy before we have hope and peace. When I look back at that bad Christmas, I see that hope and peace were absent. But one day a few months later hope began creeping back in, mainly in the form of people who loved me well. They were the messengers of hope and peace. It started with little laughs, a chance to help them out sometime and getting some thanks in return, and really just choosing to get out of bed some days.
This is why I'm no longer so into the perfect Christmas season. Instead, I feel a great call to be more than a representative of Pinterest perfection. I'd rather people see a little rough edge than a perfectly shiny exterior, because maybe then someone can feel that they aren't in this alone. The joy is yet to come. It's there deep in us, and it will resurface. After all, God's greatest joy didn't show up in any way anyone would have predicted. It was a teenage mother who didn't have a husband and gave birth surrounded by animals because there was no where else to go. Not the most ideal circumstances by far. And that's when joy has a chance, because gloom and doom are so quick to shut out the happiness, it makes experiencing true joy again so much better. Sometimes just showing up to face this holiday without holding ourselves to the ideals of what we should be feeling and just allowing ourselves to feel all the feelings, gives us permission to find joy...even if it's just a little. Because the truth is, the joy comes in the morning, it just may take a few wake-ups before we get a chance to experience it!
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