The Truth about Joy — the Fourth in our Advent Series

The joy candle is broken. You can see it up there in the picture. And I keep forgetting to buy a new one. As if a trip to the store could simply replace the broken joy. I believe it was a ball that someone threw or a somersault that some kid turned too close to that table that snapped the joy right in half. It doesn’t really matter how it happened.

The fact is that here with only a week left in our Advent waiting, joy sits crooked, busted and leaning precariously on the edge of our Advent wreath.

Of all the candles to break?

The boys laugh at the sad state of our little wreath and wonder if we shouldn’t just replace them all; hope, peace, love and joy. Then it would look new and shiny for Christmas, they insist. But something in me loves the look of that lopsided little wreath. Because, yeah. Me, too.

I always arrive at this time of the year leaning hard to find the joy and bending low to  grasp the peace and the hope that I probably dropped somewhere along the way. I break with just the slightest push and I stand a little bedraggled under the weight of it all. You too?

Worked hard to make all the magic happen and now you wonder if it will? Or maybe the season brings the hard things out and sets them right in the light. Makes you want to run to the store and buy some  shiny new hope, peace, love and joy? Because it’s Christmas for heaven’s sake! Everything is supposed to perfect and glowing.

But, really? The reason I love the broken and bent wreath is because it reminds me of what’s real. You see, Jesus didn’t come into this world to bring us good cheer and perfectly decorated houses. He came to break, to be broken, to bow low and bring us home.

He came because we are a lot like my little wreath. Unable to light ourselves and so easily tipped over.

He came because of a love that burned fierce and long.  He came because  God proclaimed this through the prophet Jeremiah generations before the baby was laid to sleep in manger:

“I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you in with loving-kindness. I will build you up again and you will be rebuilt, O Virgin Israel. Again you will take up your tambourines and go out and dance with the joyful” (Jeremiah 31:3-4).

We could not find the joy. We could not join the joyful on our own. And he came to show us that the joy, the peace, the hope and the love we so often long for? It comes in the breaking.

So we light the broken  candle as the winds blow cold here in the South. We light it and in the midst of the rushing and the wrapping; we bow our heads for just a moment.

“I have come that they may have life and may have it abundantly” (John 10:10). Jesus entering humbly, silently, quietly. Our king here to walk among us. But not like you would think. The prophets foretold the way it would happen. “See your king comes to you, righteous and victorious; lowly and riding on a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9). Joy coming in the strangest ways; in forms we never expect. And not really coming from us at all.

I think that might be it. Why the lopsided wreath and the leaning candle of joy make my heart smile. I don’t need to fix them. I just need to open my hands and receive them. It is what this waiting teaches us and what the prophets tried to insist was true, “Not by power or by might but by my Spirit says The Lord Almighty” (Zechariah 4:6).

We can’t make the joy. It just won’t work. Trust me. I might have tried.

Joy is the Lord’s to give. And he freely lavishes it on all who bend, on all who bow and on all who seek.  But, would we? Would we stop  running, spinning and striving and come. Simply come to the manger and see. Come and worship, Christ the Lord the newborn King; the joy of the Lord here among us.

“For in him [Jesus] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Colossians 1:19).

And may your hearts be full of it all; his joy, his love, his peace and his hope during this, the final week of Advent, my friends. Amen!