When Joy Doesn’t Make Sense

A Wednesday Deep Dive for Paid Subscribers

Let’s talk about joy.
Not the joy you post on Instagram.
Not the joy that comes with a balloon arch and a sugar rush.
The deeper kind.
The kind that can survive a diagnosis, a wilderness, or the silent disappointment of yet another prayer unanswered.

There’s a strange thing happening to joy in our culture.
We’re being promised a version of it that is always photogenic and rarely honest.

And we’re tired.

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📍 Before we go deeper...

Every Wednesday, paid subscribers receive The Well here on The Compass, a weekly deep dive into the interior life—biblical, theological, practical.
Today’s post explores joy that coexists with sorrow, the lies that stunt it, and the practices that deepen it.

👉 Click here to become a paid subscriber and receive this weekly resource.

You’ll also get today’s downloadable spiritual tool:
A Visio Divina Practice—created to help you see with spiritual eyes and recover joy not from escape, but from Presence.

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💬 Joy and the Fragile Heart

The Hebrew word for joy is “simchah”—a word that doesn’t mean “glee” or “good vibes,” but a kind of exultation that comes from trust.
Yes, trust.

In the Old Testament, joy is not a mood. It’s often the result of remembering:

• remembering God’s faithfulness,

• remembering you are not alone,

• remembering you are seen, even in exile.

In the New Testament, the Greek word “chara” is built on the same root as “charis” (grace).
In other words, joy comes from grace.
And grace is never earned.
It surprises you. Disarms you. Finds you when you aren’t looking.

So joy, biblically speaking, is not circumstantial.
It’s not reactive.
It’s rooted.

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🌎 Why We’re Losing Joy

Modern life runs on the false promise of control.
If you buy the right supplement, vote the right way, choose the right neighborhood, or make the right connections—you can engineer the good life.
Joy becomes the reward for hacking your way into happiness.

But that’s not joy. That’s consumption.

Here’s the quiet tragedy:
When we expect ease and instead meet hardship, joy disappears—because it was never rooted to begin with.

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🕳️ The False Joy of Easy Answers

You’ve seen it:

• The prosperity gospel version of faith, where comfort = blessing.

• The political narrative that promises plenty and more.

• The social feed where everyone else seems to be thriving, glowing, traveling, and winning.

These versions of joy are marketable.
They’re appealing.
And they’re empty.

Biblical joy, on the other hand, isn’t a bypass. It’s a companion.
It walks with you through suffering.
It doesn't shout over your grief. It sings in it.

Jesus, Scripture tells us, endured the cross “for the joy set before him.”
Not the joy of avoiding the cross.
The joy on the other side of love offered freely—even at great cost.

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🔥 The Role of Struggle

If we’re honest, we’d like to skip the hard parts.
We’d prefer to be formed without fire.
But the story of transformation doesn’t work that way.

Consider this:

What if joy is not the absence of struggle…
but the fruit of it?

Struggle is what strips us of illusion.
It removes the scaffolding of self-sufficiency we’ve built to protect us from pain.
It dismantles our quiet belief that if we do everything right, life will go the way we planned.

And let’s be honest—we’re afraid of what’s behind the curtain.
We’re afraid of what we’ll find when the illusion is gone.

Think of The Wizard of Oz—when the curtain is pulled back, the great and powerful voice turns out to be a man pulling levers, desperate to stay hidden.
That moment feels like loss.

But what if that’s the beginning of freedom?

We often fear disillusionment, but disillusionment is the loss of something that was never true.
The illusion kept us reaching for control, approval, certainty, ease.
It was thin joy—cheap, exhausting, and short-lived.

Real joy comes after the collapse.

• It’s the joy of being held, not because you are strong, but because He is.

• The joy of discovering grace at your lowest point.

• The joy of surrender that doesn’t fix the problem, but frees the soul.

• The joy of finding that God is better than the version of life you thought you had to maintain.

We don’t like the unraveling.
But it's often in the unraveling that we find out we were more deeply loved than we knew.

Only when the illusion falls can joy begin to rise.

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📜 What the Ancients Knew

We’re not the first to wrestle with joy in the dark.

In 403 AD, John Chrysostom, one of the Church’s greatest preachers, was exiled from his position as bishop of Constantinople after challenging the wealth and corruption of the powerful. Stripped of his office, sent into banishment, and eventually worked to death, he somehow still managed to write this:

“The Christian rejoices in tribulation more than in prosperity… for tribulation reveals the gold.”

That’s not triumphalism. That’s tested joy—the kind born not of ease, but of endurance.
It’s the sound of a soul that has been emptied of illusion and found something stronger in its place.

Fourteen centuries later, in 1852, Frederick Faber—a poet-priest mentored by Wordsworth and steeped in contemplative theology—put pen to paper and wrote:

Only to sit and think of God,
O what a joy it is!
To think the thought, to breathe the Name,
Earth has no higher bliss!

This isn’t soft sentimentality.
It’s the quiet knowing that to sit with God is joy enough.

Faber had discovered what Chrysostom knew:
Joy isn’t the absence of sorrow. It’s the presence of God.

When joy is rooted in grace, it does not require explanation, applause, or escape.
It survives banishment. It survives silence.
It sings—sometimes faintly, but faithfully—from within the soul.

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👁️ A Practice to Help You See

This week’s downloadable tool is a Visio Divina exercise—a contemplative practice that invites you to gaze slowly at a single image and let it speak to your heart.

You’ll receive:

• A high-resolution photo from Glacier National Park

• A step-by-step guide to practicing Visio Divina

• Space to reflect and respond in your own words or silence

We practice Visio Divina not to “see God in nature” in some vague way, but to let God use beauty to realign our inner life.
To remind us that joy is often hidden in plain sight.