I am writing from a plane today taking a quick trip to celebrate an educational milestone for one of my adult children. The joy I feel in being able to mark this moment with her is difficult to describe. It’s joy I feel in her perseverance and resilience. It’s having watched her as a little girl devour every book in the house as we often found her reading under her covers in the dark with a tiny book light and wondering where her inquisitiveness and love for learning would take her. Joy that I feel resides in deep places as I have walked alongside my children who are all adults now through so many different seasons.

When they were young we memorized Luke 2 together, I remember them at 3 and 4 reciting the familiar passage beginning with the words, “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree….” They were just words in a Christmas story to them at the time, words to string in the right order. But when we got to this phrase, great joy which will be for all the people. something shifted.

We lived in Asia at the time, and there was heavy sense of felt disparity between our home life and the reality of the children at the special needs orphanage I volunteered at. It was hard to reconcile the joy that we experienced as a family and what I knew to be the reality of the babies and children I spent time with several times a week. My kids were young when we fostered several babies for a time. It often takes the honesty of a 3 year old to ask questions that some of us adults dare not ask. “Why did God allow them to suffer like that?” Many of the children at the home had been born with severe health challenges and for reasons we didn’t know but could guess at- had been given up by parents. I remember my 4 year old asking, “Does God see this little baby and why does he not have parents like I do?”

It’s hard to understand something so deep and complex as love- as love is often experienced as care and often bleeds into a space that dreams that joy comes only in the absence of pain. And that is where joy becomes complicated.

Because if God loves this baby—if He sees, if He knows—why does suffering remain?

This is where the coming of Christ matters more than a tidy explanation ever could.

Jesus did not arrive during a season of peace, justice, or ease. He came under Herod, a ruler threatened by whispers of another King. He came when fear dictated policy and power crushed the vulnerable. He came into poverty, into displacement, into danger. From His first breath, His life was marked by threat and loss. The timing was not accidental.

“Great joy for all the people” was not an announcement that pain would immediately cease. It was the declaration that God Himself had come.

Jehovah Shalom did not stand at a distance offering comfort from afar. He came as a baby who would know hunger, grief, rejection, and injustice. He came to be seen by the unseen and to belong to those who had been abandoned. His presence redefined joy—not as the absence of suffering, but as the nearness of God within it.

The joy of Christ’s coming is not that everything is suddenly fair or healed or whole. It is that no place is untouched by His presence. No child unseen. No question ignored. No darkness final.

And maybe that is why joy can live so deeply—even alongside grief. It is the joy of knowing that God sees. That He has come. And that He is still at work, even when the answers feel incomplete.

Those days of holding babies in the orphanage whose stories were already heavy, and joy felt fragile, I often felt desperate.

“Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you.”
For the powerless. For the unprotected.
For us.
To all the people.