You can prepare,but still

it will come to you

by surprise,

crossing through your doorway

calling your name in greeting,

turning like a child

who quickens suddenly

within you.

It will astonish you

how wide your heart 

will open

in welcome

for the joy

that finds you

so ready 

and still so

unprepared.

~Jan Richardson, Circle of Grace

Joy. We prepare for it. We anticipate it. We hope for it. We desire it. We long for it. We are sometimes desperate for it. Especially in these days of waiting for Christmas to arrive, we look for joy in all the corners and behind every door. All the outward messages say it is something we can buy…or steal…or find wrapped up in a beautiful box. But joy is much sneakier than that.One thing that living a few years can teach is that joy can be elusive. Different than happiness which can be found in a good joke or a laugh here and there, joy goes bone deep. It finds its home in our heart and moves out from there into the way we move and act in the world. And when it is playing its hide-and-seek game with us, it can be a painful dance. 

Last night I was privileged to be in the presence of people who were seeking after joy. They were trying to find a dance partner named Joy while also holding the deep loss of a loved one or the pervasive loss of the world right now. We had come together to rest in the comfort of sacred words and music in a search for hope and healing. They were doing the work of preparing for joy even when its presence seemed impossible or at least improbable. But their honesty of feeling and experience was rich and humbling and it prepared the soil of their hearts for the return of joy. It was a blessing to me to help hold the space for their waiting.

It is easy to get caught up in the lights and tinsel of this season, to think that we are all walking around in a Hallmark television special just waiting to be filmed. One of those stories where everything is in soft light and lovely and predictably joyful. But we need only change channels to know it is not true. Small children are handed from over-filled rubber, lifeboats to total strangers in an effort to flee a country gone wild with misused power and fear. Certain people, those given to mistrust, cower as they pass by those they have named ‘other’, ‘stranger’. Labels and names are assigned to faiths other than our own and become the people who hold their faith as sacred as I do mine are demonized.

And even in these times, perhaps especially in these times, we still prepare for joy. Why? Because, I believe, at our very core, we were made for this bone-deep emotion. As the Creator breathed over the waters and brought forth all that is, what was there but joy? Joy at creating. Joy at its beauty. Joy at the promise of it all. As the Spirit moves through each and every breath and beating heart no matter the color of skin, or what they believe or their life situation, joy is the thread that weaves through it all. Sometimes that joy is overshadowed but its wisdom and nature lives at the center.

Today the invitation is to prepare. Today we have the opportunity to fling the door of our heart open and make wide the welcome. May we find there the gift of surprise. May we find there the gift of joy.