We’re tooling right along to year’s end and it’s about this time we start seeing magazine articles remembering all those we’ve ‘lost’ in the past twelve months. Looking further back, it is truly amazing all the ‘things’ we’ve lost, too. We no longer unfold road maps. They’ve been replaced by GPS on our phones. We no longer handwrite letters, favoring instead, emails or texts. We no longer live in an analog world. It’s now digital everything. Calendars have all but disappeared, being replaced, again, by an app on our phones. Speaking of that, has anybody seen a phone book lately? A new adjective has entered our everyday language: ‘brick-and-mortar’ stores, even as those very entities are in the process of disappearing like the dodo, overcome, of course, by another new term: ‘etail.’ We live in a techie, headlong rush to the newest, latest, and greatest. My problem is that (please don’t tell anyone) I’m at least six computer upgrades behind! I know. Gasp! Oops. Now it’s seven.
I have to admit that, concerning my laptop, I am the biggest problem. To my perception, there are strange and irksome things that happen while I am working on it. The screen sometimes changes all by itself. In Word (the program or app or whatever it is, not God’s), my cursor flits about like an over-caffeinated butterfly. I’m constantly hunting it down, often after typing a whole line of text which it has inserted in some random location! On the other hand, I know I’m grossly underestimating the cool things my machine is capable of doing. The tech support team I subscribe to is always very polite and patient, but I’m quite sure there’s a behind the scenes rolling of the eyes with each of my visits – pitying the poor old soul who’s a worry to himself.
I’m on this ramble because the third theme of Advent this Sunday is: Joy. I’m quite sure I grossly underestimate it, too. After all, I mean, this is Jesus’ joy which he has passed on to me, to you. We’re not talking a weak smile once a day, here. Jesus has tapped us into the Source! The very ambience of the Trinity as they interact with one another in the courts of Heaven. In his mercy, although he has us plugged in to that Divine Power grid, he throttles it back so as not to fry all our circuits. I think his Joy, ramped up to full strength, would be so overwhelming we’d need surgery. When we sing, ‘There is power in the name of Jesus.’ I wonder if we really grasp this gift, this powerful gift, called Joy. “ . . . you will see me again! And then your hearts will burst with joy, with no one being able to take it from you!” Hmm. John 16:24, TPT. PD
