“The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is Joy.”
–Fra Giovanni

“Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”

–C.S. Lewis

Dear Diary,

Ever since Adam told his kids stories, we’ve known that no story is worth hearing unless it involves struggle. The word “protagonist” means primary or first struggler and the Old English word from which we get our word “drama” means “to strive.” The first struggler must overcome some great obstacle, so I’ve spent much of my life imagining that I’m the center of my story because I feel there is so much that I must overcome outside of myself. But…

What if I am not the first struggler and the obstacle to overcome is not outside myself?

What if I’m not the center of my own story, as we often assume, but Christ is? What if he is the protagonist, the first struggler, who overcame not only sin, but who is overcoming me. What if all of me, my heart and intentions and imagination and identity, is the great obstacle? And what if my life is NOT the story of ME overcoming my myself (which is impossible), but of Christ doing so?

I’m reminded of that astonishing story of Jacob we find in Genesis 32. It says, “The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had…And Jacob was left alone” (v. 22-24). And then, through the fog strode a strong man. Jacob wrestled with that stranger all night until the dawn when the man “touched his hip socket and Jacob’s hip was put out of join as he wrestled with him” (v. 25).

Like Jacob, I have felt alone. In that aloneness, I have felt the strong arm of God touch me and force vulnerability.

Jacob thought the stranger was an opponent until he was defeated by his opponent. Only then did he discover that the divine stranger was his fiercest ally, the great protagonist of Jacob’s story. It was never about what Jacob was doing for God. It was about what God was doing to him and the story of which he was a part.

The picture of Christ as the first struggler, the protagonist, forces an imaginative shift for us as it did for Jacob. This whole complex narrative called “Life” is not about us. We are busy, busy, busy, but busy building our own kingdoms, staying ahead of the curve, keeping up with the Joneses. We’re not often busy serving God, even in ministry, but we’re often busy serving ourselves. And there it is again, my friends: the ego which Christ, the great protagonist, is in the business of overcoming.

For this reason, G.K. Chesterton wrote, “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure…You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theater in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers…How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you open, free like other men to look up as well as down” (Orthodoxy).

Perhaps, then, our search for joy should embrace defeat. All those humbling, ego-crushing, events of life might be a secret key to joy. Perhaps this too is proof that the old paradoxes are also the best and wisest paths to joy: we live by dying, we win by losing, the way up is down, and those who are lost are found.

My life story is about God, the main character, and my life purpose is to welcome his intrusive, insistent love.

[painting by Caravaggio, “The Conversion of Paul”]

Dear Diary (or Dear Self),

“What do you love in this marionette world? Or is the world a puppeteer, pulling the strings of your heart? You cannot be the world’s marionette and still be a living, dancing boy who loves God. For all this marionette show–its painted eyes and wooden hearts, its prancing puppets and groping hands–is not as open or real or bright as God’s great story.

The puppet show will break, and ticket sales fail, and the limp puppets leaning helplessly against each other will be shoved in boxes and removed, but the real boy who lifts his face to God and sings God’s songs will live forever.

I, therefore, the slave of God, beg you to sing well. Sing melodiously and patiently, harmonizing graciously with others, listening to them in such a way that your song, together, will fill the blue sky. For you are part of one people, all real and warm and breathing, and he has given you the world and one great purpose in it.”

(A modern rendering of I John 2:15-17 and Eph. 4:1-4).

“It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”

–Brother David Steindl-Rast

Dear Diary,

I pulled out of my driveway this evening and started heading east. My mind was burdened after a hard day, but I was due to speak in thirty minutes at a local church. I was trying to get my mind in the game, preparing to speak to them from the deepest places of myself, when I saw it rising above the hills in all her splendor: a radiant full moon. The moon was bigger and brighter than usual. It swallowed me in its beauty and stillness. I was struck by a joy-instilling fact in that moment. The moon is 14.6 million square miles of absolute, cratered deadness and dust. That massive light in the sky each night has nothing truly wonderful in and of itself to share with me. Its brightness only reflects a greater glory. All night long, it reflects the sun’s greater glory.

Milton suggests that the reason the moon is so cratered and dead is because it was the victim of that divine conflict between the hosts of Heaven and Satan’s army. It is a dead rock as a consequence of being at the center of a cosmic battle.

Like the moon, our brokenness, bewilderment, and suffering is the consequence of a cosmic battle. We live in a broken world full of cratered lives that are witness to atrocities so awful, I will not speak them with my mouth. Let me never be guilty of romanticizing that suffering. Like the moon, there is nothing sweet or lovely about our suffering, but that does not negate the fact that our stories, all the dust and darkness included, has the potential to reflect God’s great glory in a world desperate for it. That, my friends, is worth considering in our pursuit of joy.

When we point our face toward the Son, we reflect His greater glory. When we give God glory and praise and thanks, as Christ did even at his darkest moments, then we shine in the darkness.

God keeps joy aflame in our hearts when we allow our stories to reflect his greater glory.

Joy is a gift from God and he loves to give it to those who cry out to him, long for him, and praise him with thanks, not despite their circumstances but because of them. If even the rocks cry out, reflecting His glory, then so can we.

“Joy is the serious business of heaven.”

–C.S. Lewis from Letters to Malcolm