They Chose Joy in a World of Darkness

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Christmastime is the time to be extremely happy, right? We all try to hold onto that giddiness and magic we had as children when we become adults, but sometimes life wears us down.

This year's Christmas in the U.S. after three months in Italy added some culture shock to my experience. Jet lag mixed with a highly commercial culture and fast food economy was making me nauseous the first few days back home in Missouri. My saving grace was my family and the time I could spend with them away from mainstream society.

But Christmas wasn’t easy. Meeting my sister’s boyfriend had its bumps, and watching how my grandfather struggled with his dementia broke my heart. Wasn’t Christmas supposed to be all bliss like the good old days?

But then I remembered how Christmas happened those 2,000 years ago, and it was anything but bliss. It was a hot, dirty, messy, depressing and tyrannically violent world for the Jews in the Roman Empire, so happiness was far and fleeting. A people persecuted and without their own sovereignty, the Jews looked back on the good old days of King David. But hope was just ahead. 
Google image of film scene from The Nativity (2006)
Enter Jesus. Jesus was born in the lowliest conditions to an ethnicity that was persecuted. Not a happy life from the start, but he offered the greatest hope in His birth. From the beginning, Jesus related to us in the pain and discomfort of his birth. It wasn’t just on the cross that Jesus related to us in life's suffering; his birth was the first instance of relating to mankind in life's suffering - entering a new world with fatigue, hunger and temperature fluxes. Less than a few years later, King Herod sought out to execute all Jewish boys two years and older, targeting Jesus, so it really was a bad time to be a Jewish boy. Thanks be to God who saved Jesus from that awful fate.

To bring everything together, I just want to say that Christmas doesn’t mean complete happiness because Jesus relates to us on Christmas by entering this earth in a dark time very similar to today’s times. But Christmas must be joyful because joy is the choice to choose happiness and hope in every circumstance. And while Christmas 2,000 years ago seemed really hopeless in the circumstances that Jesus was born in, Jesus and his parents chose joy and so should we this Christmas.

Even when it seems like Christmas is not going the way we planned, we should choose joy because, “unto us a child is born!”, and that is the greatest type of happiness and hope that has existed. So remember that Jesus suffered and suffers alongside in the darkness of the events surrounding your Christmas, but that is more the reason to choose joy and hope to believe in the impossible. Jesus has done the impossible on the cross and then being raised from the dead, so let’s believe in the impossible despite our circumstances.

Don’t deny the pain in this world, but I encourage you to choose joy in every moment this Christmas season and New Year's holiday. To paraphrase singer Francesca Battistelli, spread that little more of heaven [and Christmas joy] everywhere.
Location: Saint Louis, MO, USA

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