Advent week #3: JOY

I wrote this as part of my church's weekly Advent reflections, and thought I'd share it here too.

Psalm 146

Everything exists in pairs of opposites.

Light and dark, lost and found, love and apathy; These are a few examples of physical, conceptual, and emotional opposites that exist around us, and one can’t exist without the other. How can you know what light is without knowing about the dark? Or find something that isn’t lost? Or really recognize the experience of love for what it is without having experienced apathy before too?

Our theme of Advent this week is joy which, to me, is the feeling of overflowing happiness and pleasure. Joy, like everything else, also has an opposite: gloom. Can someone experience joy without having experienced gloom before? Yes, it’s possible, but I think those who have previously endured gloom would have a deeper appreciation and heightened experience of joy compared to those who have not had to; I also think the two experiences are proportionally related.

With that in mind, I think this might be the point of this Psalm: To those who experience gloom through betrayal, oppression, captivity, blindness, metaphorical heaviness, abandonment, or anything else, take heart and know that joy is coming because God is with you, He loves you, and He is for you. Know that God is loyal because His promises are true. Know that He will feed, free, heal, and lighten your heaviest load because He is present, active, and working in the here and now. Know that He will never abandon you because you are His beloved. Know that the gloom of today will heighten the joy of tomorrow just like the darkest skies always reveal the brightest stars. Know that the morning is coming; Joy is coming, because the King is coming.