Another week dawns, and it’s time to focus on joy. The shepherds’ joy, as tradition goes, to be exact.

Growing up with a minister for a father, I heard many observations and catchy statements offered about this virtue called joy. Among the most common were the acronym JOY standing for Jesus-Others-You (that is, one will never find true joy unless they put others first and themselves last) and the concept of happiness being something tied to flippant emotions but joy being tied to a steadier peace the sits deep in the heart through the storms of life.

But this year, I can’t escape the thought that those pithy ideas don’t go deep enough. There is something more magnificent to be found in the gift of the Babe – though our finite minds may only be able to grasp a glimpse or a fraction of that depth while we dwell on this earth, in this skin.

Perhaps that is because it is, essentially, something that goes far beyond the skin, both down into the soul of us and upward into the Spirit of God.

What if true joy has less to do with what we can feel and can describe and aim to work for – and has far more to do with the wonder of the mystery we cannot describe but that we hunger for? It is the unknown thing we crave when we are far from the Babe. And it is the thing we long to understand and experience more fully even when the Babe is near and in us. 

Because the true joy we sense on earth is like the appetizer of Heaven’s coming banquet. 

In that light, I think joy even more than hope – or perhaps in an inseparable combination with hope – is what keeps us going when there is no other logical reason for us to keep going. And it does so by overshadowing our fear with something greater.

The shepherds were nobodies, in the lowest class of workers in their culture. Then, suddenly, their hum-drum, lowly existence was interrupted by a tsunami of fear and awe. And then, they listened to a pair of commands sandwiched around a song and ran to see if the outrageously-ridiculous could defy everything known to actually be possible.

And when they saw it, they could do nothing else but spread the news and give glory to God.

May that same Spirit, that Babe, and that joy encapsulate our hearts today.