Wilderness seasons, man. Don’t they seem to go on forever? This year has been one ongoing wilderness season for me and my family: multiple challenging family health situations, a friend relapsing, my own dishonesty hurting my relationship with my wife and the subsequent effort to repair that relationship, 3 months when my family had to move out of our house, multiple exciting job-related opportunities for me and my wife coming to an abrupt close… and that’s just the first 6 months of this year. The second half of the year has had many of its own challenges (in addition to managing an emotional hangover from the first 6 months) that have made this year a year of wandering with little direction and little encouragement. I can’t tell you how many times this year I’ve prayed the lyrics “I am just a thinning stream, I have nothing left in me.”

For all of the bitterness I could hold (and have held), for all of the aimlessness I’ve felt, I wouldn’t say this year has been lost. I point to the daily joy my daughter brings to me and my wife. I point to the closeness and love I feel in my marriage despite my own bullheadedness. I point to the frequent and fleeting little moments that have rooted this year of tumult firmly by the stream of living water. I point to joy.

The fact that joy is a theme of Advent season is bewildering, isn’t it? The miraculous and socially scandalous conception in Mary, the census trip, the lack of room in the inn, birthing a child in a feeding trough, it all points to hardship, to challenge, to resilience certainly, but to joy?

Joy is not happiness. As Brene Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection, “Happiness is tied to circumstance and joyfulness is tied to spirit and gratitude.” In other words, joy is not a product of our circumstance but a product of our being. This means that we can be joyful and deeply unhappy or happy and un-joyful at the same time. Joy is a result of our spiritual posture that not only finds the sliver of blue sky on a rainy day, but dares to look for it in the first place. Just as Mary and Joseph were surely unhappy with their lodging, it couldn’t dampen the joy at the birth of their child, their silver lining in the manger.

Yet for all the tenacity that joy has, it is, by necessity, fleeting and temporary. The joy of childbirth doesn’t make waking up for the 2 a.m. feeding easy for long. And though I’ve experienced many joyful moments this year, it hasn’t made the challenges any less challenging. It has only made them more bearable. Those moments have, like the manna in Israel’s wilderness season, been just enough sustenance to get me through the day at hand. Joy is powerful, but it isn’t always persistent. In other words, joy isn’t a permanent reversal of circumstances, but a reminder that circumstances aren’t permanent. Joy, as this year has taught me, is a choice that must be made and remade daily.

Which is a challenge as much as it is an encouragement. In the challenge of my year, I have, and continue to be, “deeply unhappy” (to use the words I use with my therapist). I am unhappy but, by some miracle, I have not been calloused. I have been able to bear my hurt, to share my hurt, so that it hasn’t been all-consuming. I have worked hard to own my hurt some of the time so that it doesn’t own me all of the time. It’s these moments of ownership when those fleeting moments of joy have called my gaze from my navel to the people, the moment around me. An infectious giggle. A moment of shared purpose. A glass of wine once the kid has gone down. Voicing appreciation for the blessings already received and sharing hope for the blessings yet to come. These moments can all be routine, but joy restores their meaning to me. It’s in these utterly routine, every-day occurrences that I can choose to see the persistent, present, real Goodness of God show up in my life through the people I love most.

So in this season when things can be unhappy, with reflection on the good and bad of the year, when budgets struggle to be balanced, when meals and expectations converge, when life feels like carpet in a barber shop, I look to Mary and Joseph, for whom nothing was perfect except the one thing that mattered. Lord, may it be so.