For When Christmas Doesn't Feel Joyful

Devotional

Everybody around you is celebrating and you're trying to find a way in.

The carols are playing. The lights went up. The invitations came.

And you're standing in the middle of it wondering why the music sounds like it's coming from another room. Why the brightness feels like it belongs to somebody else's life.

Maybe you buried somebody this year. Maybe a relationship broke in a way that isn't going to get fixed. Maybe nothing dramatic happened at all, and that's part of what's confusing.

You just feel the weight. And all the cheer pressing in from every direction makes it heavier, not lighter.

So there are two things you're probably tempted to do.

You can perform. Smile, show up, say the right things, push the heaviness down where nobody can see it.

Or you can withdraw. Decide the whole season is a lie and just wait out December.

Both of those come from the same place. They both assume joy and sorrow can't be in the same room. That if you're really hurting, the celebration must be fake. Or if the celebration is real, your pain must not count.

Scripture will not accept that trade.

"Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy."

Look at that picture. The weeping doesn't stop before the joy shows up. The farmer is crying while he sows.

The tears fall on the same ground that grows the harvest.

Joy doesn't replace sorrow here. It comes up out of it.

That's gospel logic. It isn't the world's logic, which says joy comes when your circumstances improve. It isn't sentimental logic, which says joy comes when you think better thoughts.

Gospel joy comes through the valley. Not around it.

Jesus said it to his disciples straight: "You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy."

Read that carefully. He didn't say their sorrow would be swapped out for joy, like trading one thing for another at a counter.

He said it would turn into joy. The grief itself would become the material.

Then he gave them a picture: "When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish."

The pain was real. Nobody's pretending labor doesn't hurt.

But something living came through it. And the joy on the other side didn't erase the suffering. It explained it. It showed that the whole thing had been labor all along.

Isaiah saw this centuries before the manger. He described someone anointed "to bind up the brokenhearted," someone who would "comfort all who mourn."

And then this: "a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit."

Every one of those is an exchange. Beauty for ashes. Gladness for grief. Praise for despair.

But don't miss what an exchange requires.

You have to bring the ashes to get the headdress. You have to show up faint to be clothed in praise.

God isn't asking you to pretend the ashes aren't real. He's asking you to bring them.

So if Christmas doesn't feel joyful this year, you're not failing at something.

You're standing exactly where God's people have always stood while they wait. In the already and the not yet.

Christ has come. That's true and nothing in your circumstances can undo it.

But he hasn't come back yet to make everything new, and you're feeling that gap in your body.

Here's the question. It isn't whether you can manufacture joy. You can't, and he isn't asking you to.

The question is whether you can receive it as a gift that sits right alongside your pain.

Habakkuk did. Look at what he was staring at: "Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines... the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls."

Everything gone. Every earthly thing he could have leaned on, failed.

And then he says something that should stop you.

"Yet I will rejoice in the LORD."

That word "yet" is the hinge of the whole Christian life. Three letters carrying an enormous amount of weight.

It doesn't deny the empty stalls. It doesn't pretend the loss isn't devastating.

It just refuses to let the circumstances decide where joy lives.

Habakkuk's joy wasn't in the harvest. It was in God. And drought couldn't touch it.

That's the joy Advent is holding out to you.

Not the joy of a good holiday. Not the joy of pain that finally got resolved.

The joy of a God who walked into suffering himself so that suffering would never get the last word.

The Son of God was born to a displaced mother in an occupied country. He came into the tears, not around them.

And he came so he could one day say, "I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you."

You don't have to feel joyful to be held by a joyful God. You don't have to sing to be sung over.

So bring the sorrow to the manger this year. Don't clean it up first.

It's not too heavy for the one lying there.

He was born to carry it.