..For the most part, segments of our life – often entire chunks of it – aren’t going well and much of it we don’t live well. Given that joy attaches to life going well and being led well, must joy be lost to us? It need not be. We can rejoice over the many small goods we experience, and for those of us who are religious, we can find joy in the One Good that is both the source and the goal of our existence.
Though fragmentary, all small joys celebrate goods in our lives that are and remain wonderful, at times no more than tender plants in the cracks of our otherwise heavily cemented and gray lives. And in all true joys we yearn for, and perhaps also faintly experience, a world in which all things and all manner of things shall be well.
A thoughtful and interesting exposition on joy. I read through it expecting it to reach its Christian point of the reason for joy, but it never came. Volf never quite got there.
The Letter to the Hebrews says
That is why Christians are joyful – for the joy set before us, of eternal life with our God, who gives us a future and a hope.