Paul writes about joy most often from a prison cell. James tells people to count it all joy when they meet trials. Neither of them appears to be describing cheerfulness, and both of them have been read that way by roughly everyone, including me for about fifteen years.

The problem with reading joy as a mood

If joy is a mood, then its absence is a symptom, and a Christian who is not cheerful is malfunctioning. This is a miserable way to live and it produces an enormous amount of performance on a Sunday morning.

It also does not survive contact with the text. Paul is not cheerful in prison. He is frequently anxious, occasionally furious, and once so exhausted he says he despaired of life itself. He describes all of this in the same letters where he tells people to rejoice.

What the word is doing instead

Closer to a settled orientation toward what is true, held whether or not the feelings cooperate. Not optimism, which is a prediction. Not happiness, which is a response to circumstances. Something more like a bearing — the direction you are pointed when nothing in particular is happening.

• Happiness answers: how is it going?
• Optimism answers: how will it go?
• Joy answers: what is true, regardless?

That third one can be held by someone who is crying. Which is the whole point, and why it is worth rescuing from the definition we have given it.

“Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” Paul puts both in one sentence, without any sense that they are in tension. We are the ones who added the tension.

Practices that seem to help

None of these will make you feel better this week. Several of them will change what you are oriented toward within a year.

1. Name three true things daily. Not three good things — three true things. The distinction matters in a bad season, when the good ones are hard to find and the true ones are not.
2. Keep the corporate stuff. Joy in the New Testament is almost always plural. It is very difficult to sustain alone and quite hard to avoid in company.
3. Stop auditing the feeling. Checking whether you feel joyful is the reliable way to stop feeling anything at all.

What to do with a joyless season

Nothing dramatic. Keep the room, keep the Tuesday, keep the practice. Tell one person the truth about where you are.

A season with no feeling in it is not evidence of anything having gone wrong. On the evidence of the letters, it is the ordinary weather of a serious faith, and it lifts.