The pink candle has been lit. The pace quickens as we move
closer to the feast. Christmas is coming - oh, the joy.
Except when the rose vestments sometimes just serve as a
painful reminder that we are supposed to feel joy, but we
don't.
Not only are we fighting from within to feel something we
want to feel, we are combatting an entire culture - both
secular and religious - that is insistent that this is the
season for joy. Maybe we need to look past the bright lights
and even past the rose-colored splendor. Maybe we need to
remember that Christmas didn't come with the blare of
trumpets repeating the sounding joy. It came in a stable,
dark and dank. God chose a place of unlikely humility to
introduce the very incarnation of joy.
How best to welcome Joy Himself? Bow low in simple humility -
really low, where it's damp and stinky. How best to evade
Joy? Compete, compare and foster jealousy. Keep paging
through those catalogs of beautifully staged "lives." Keep
perusing Instagram and watching wistfully what looks like
perfectly executed tableaux of warmth and fellowship (but are
really just framed and filtered snippets of good). Keep
looking longingly through store windows and assuming that if
you could just own that - whatever that is - you'd be more
loved and more lovable. Keep feeding envy.
Oh, and another thing sure to steal the joy of the season:
Somehow tangle the Christmas lights and the Advent candles
with the deadlines and the grades of semester's end. That
will do it. Push yourself to near exhaustion trying to prove
your worth as evidenced by a letter grade and then compare to
the letter grades around you, and you have a perfect way to
extinguish any and all joy of the season.
Can't relate? Perhaps you've traded the intensity and
competition of "finals week" for the corporate ladder, the
bonus structure or the more subtle and more insidious
competition of women who have no institutional structure by
which to compare. They compare workouts, Pinterest-worthy
parties, kitchens and, sadly, the achievements of their
children. You don't feel joy because joy is not attained by
climbing higher and getting bigger in this life. And for
goodness sake, the person who feels joy most is not the
person who "does Christmas best."
Christmas isn't something we do. It's a gift we receive.
Joy isn't a feeling. It's a conviction. It's a choice. Joy is
knowing that Christ came in a most unexpected, dark, and
messy way the first time He came. Joy is knowing He will come
again to shed light on our dark places, and He doesn't
purpose to stand in the harsh, artificial glare of our
earthly glory.
We are transformed into joyful beings when we let go of the
created structures we've been worshiping and we serve God
alone. Until our souls cease striving and instead seek
serving, we can't avoid the negative trappings of pride and
presumption, competition and comparison. Our good - the
things we truly do for the good - is to be ordered to the
service of God alone. When those good deeds are directed
toward the human accolades they bring, one of two things
happens (sometimes one is followed by the other). Either the
human praise and the good feelings that come with it offer a
fleeting happiness and enough self-conceit to fuel the
insatiable desire to be bigger and better, or our best
efforts are deemed not good enough either in our own eyes or
the eyes of our perceived human judges and the effort brings
bitter disappointment.
Joy comes to the soul that orders all "the doing" to the Baby
in the manger. We cannot be deceived or tempted away from
humility when our productivity at this time of year or any
other is focused on serving as God serves. When we look away
from the constant barrage of social media and flashing ads
and even test scores and GPAs and we contemplate the humility
of the manger, the very simplicity of the one life we truly
want to emulate, we detach from the self-seeking and the
self-praise that rob us of joy. The poor in spirit are the
ones who truly share the glory and joy.
You are not good enough. You will never be good enough. But
Christ in you? You, detached from the praise of this world
and free to join in His glory? So very good. And so very
joyful.
Merry Christmas.
Foss, whose website is elizabethfoss.com, is a freelance
writer from Northern Virginia.