Deepen your JOY this Christmas

I’ve been watching some inspiring movie clips of late. It’s got me thinking.

Christmas is supposed to be about peace, hope and joy. But we limp to the line, exhausted, disenfranchised, cynical; we suffer disordered instances of seasonal affectation, and spend our final hours fretting about purchasing presents, while we bear grief in our hearts regarding losses we’ve suffered and relationships that went into the abyss. Then there are the ‘next level’ traumas that we have worn. We may even be astonished that this year as we look back would have been unfathomable from last year’s context.

Every now and again, I think of my son who died without taking a single breath, much as we anticipated him at his birth. The circumstances of his stillbirth were a great shock to us, even if we knew he wouldn’t survive long after his birth. And yet, four months previously we had the greatest shock of all, right there in the sonographer’s rooms, and then again eighteen days later by a disturbing diagnosis. There was a lot of unanticipated grief during that season.

These experiences we don’t despise; they deepened us.

It is too easy to become jaded and cynical about life; the very things that God gave us to deepen us, if we’re not careful, will besmirch our peace and destroy our hope. Instead of using the very things that God gave us to build us in stature of maturity, we too easily take those things and want to smite God with them.

The fact is, evils do come into our lives, but God’s will is that these would not crush us to nothing. In the crushing, however, having come again to the limit of our own resources, we invariably fall to our knees in coming to know the only way forward is to surrender in order to derive strength from God. From frustration to despair to surrender to transformation.

If we want to experience something new and transformational this Christmas, we can do better than watch an inspiring movie scene or thirteen. Much better. We can do much better than doing the same thing we’ve always done. Much better than feeling vulnerable emotionally, because the year has worn us down more than until recently we’ve realised, there is a better way.

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If we wish to deepen our joy this Christmas, we need to dig deeply down into ourselves, get a little time out (alone, away from people, I mean) and think intently about the really significant things of life and death, which inspire gratitude notwithstanding the horrors we’ve faced. We think on the word, “Opportunity,” and pray about responding rather than simply reacting. We’d think on the things that open us up.

If we wish to deepen our joy this Christmas, we cannot afford to neglect any apparent need, even if that threatens to spoil the continuity of our peace. In doing this, in agreeing to walk hand in hand with God out into the floating depths, we give our Lord permission to broaden us as we’re deepened, for our joy can only be deepened when we have a reservoir deep enough for that filling. Of course, it’s scary. It goes with the terrain! We can take a certain comfort from the opportunity that life presents us with; for none of us willingly go deeper without being taken there by divine insistence. So, as we take the Lord’s hand, even though this is a tremendously difficult season, we wade out in faith that we’re held; no matter the terror, we’ll be safe.

Rarely is a season of hardship commensurate with joy, but there are glimpses that connect us with that indelible hope, and faith compels us to follow the vision of it. It is just as counterintuitive as it is true, that as we get beyond the cloister of safe depth and can no longer feel the earth beneath our feet, at such depth we do feel carried. Finally, with no scaffold to cling white-knuckled to, we recognise the ingenuity of trust.

If this Christmas is hard, maybe harder than ever, cling to the hope that your joy is being deepened; that the fruit of this season will be borne on the tree of life some months, even years away.

In the meantime, even as we suffer the indignities that come our way, we recognise that it’s not as we turn inward that we see Christ suffering in humanity, but it’s as we turn outward and see others in their suffering that we’re most inspired to continue in our own, and hence we come to notice that ours is lessened.

It’s in seasons of testing and hardship,
though we would hardly recognise it,
that our joy is being deepened.

Somehow suffering does connect us
with a deeper joy, eventually.

Photo by Jim Beaudoin on Unsplash