{"id":13893,"date":"2025-12-26T23:29:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T23:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=13893"},"modified":"2025-12-26T23:29:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T23:29:17","slug":"defiant-joy-this-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=13893","title":{"rendered":"Defiant joy this Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"


By Kaeley Harms<\/span><\/span>, Wednesday, December 24, 2025<\/span>Getty Images <\/span><\/p>\n

My favorite Christmas song is not one of the usual frontrunners. It isn\u2019t \u201cO Holy Night\u201d or \u201cMary Did You Know\u201d or \u201cHark the Herald Angels Sing.\u201d It\u2019s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s \u201cI Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years ago, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed it with Ed Herrmann narrating the tragic story\u00a0behind the poem, written after the death of Longfellow\u2019s wife and while his son lay gravely wounded in the Civil War. This was not a man insulated from suffering, humming about peace from a safe distance.<\/p>\n

In the middle of the poem, Longfellow admits what many of us are afraid to say out loud:<\/p>\n

Then in despair, I bowed my head,
There is no peace on earth, I said.
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.<\/p>\n

That stanza feels bracingly honest. It names the dissonance between what we sing and what we see, between the theology we affirm and the ache we carry. It\u2019s where many of us live, especially those holding things together for everyone else. This is the third consecutive blog I\u2019ve written in this tone, and I promise to return to the main event of unflinching women\u2019s advocacy in the near future, but today, I think it\u2019s important to continue extending a lifeline to those struggling to stay afloat. People desperately need to know they\u2019re not alone.<\/p>\n

At church last Sunday, the sermon made careful distinctions between happiness and joy. Happiness is situational. Joy is not. Joy does not wait for circumstances to resolve. It does not require emotional equilibrium. It is not fragile.<\/p>\n

This week, joy has felt less like an emotion and more like an act of rebellion. Depression does not feel holy, which means it often goes unnamed. It feels like sin to say it out loud, like ingratitude dressed up as a diagnosis. How can you be depressed when the Lord has been so faithful? How can you be depressed when He has given you so much? Those questions burn, and they quietly shame people like me into the sidelines. I laughed with a friend this week and called it\u00a0happy depression. I like my life. I am grateful for it. And my brain chemistry is still a complete gong show, despite prayer, obedience, and the medication I take to balance everything the heck out in my head.<\/p>\n

For Christians, joy is anchored in the love of Christ and the promise of a happy ending. It is not dependent on circumstances, chemical balances, or the absence of grief. Joy is the courage to engage life fully, to show up at the table, to wrap presents, to carve out moments with your children, because even in the middle of loss, God\u2019s faithfulness remains. It is the quiet assurance that nothing, not even despair, has the final word. Joy is a stubborn trust in the God who redeems, a trust that lifts us to act, to love, to live, even when our hearts are heavy.<\/p>\n

This week at women\u2019s Bible study, one of the discussion questions asked whether we saw ourselves as rule breakers or rule followers. At 42, I was the youngest at my table by a good 10\u201315 years and the only one who identified as a rule breaker. What struck me \u2014 and amused me \u2014 was realizing that the rule keepers and I were all motivated by the same thing: the illusion of control. We just had different means of achieving it. Some followed rules, some bent them, some ignored them entirely. Depression, in its stubbornness, reminds me how little control I actually have. Choosing joy in the middle of it feels like rule-breaking too. It is a deliberate defiance, a refusal to let despair dictate my life, even when my mind and body insist otherwise.<\/p>\n

This week, it was triggered when my kids didn\u2019t get callbacks for theater auditions. The cast list won\u2019t be posted until tomorrow, which leaves just enough space for hope to bruise. I refuse to be a stage mom, but rejection has a way of resurfacing by proxy, wearing my children\u2019s faces, pressing on old wounds that know exactly where to ache. I remind myself this doesn\u2019t carry eternal weight. I\u2019m actually privileged to have this as my problem. Others face real catastrophes, grief, death. In the grand scheme, this is a nothing burger. But depression doesn\u2019t yield to truth bombs. Knowing it\u2019s small doesn\u2019t make it feel small when your brain insists the sky is falling. Facts can be true and pain still real, coexisting in stubborn tension. Depression ignores perspective. It amplifies every fear and mutes hope. So I hold the dissonance: grateful yet hurting, privileged yet heavy. I speak truth without denying the ache, because pretending it isn\u2019t there only strengthens its grip.<\/p>\n

When my thoughts spiral, I notice how tempting it is to retreat, to reduce the world to my own interior weather. But joy, if it\u2019s real, does not hide. It insists on participation. It demands embodiment. It slaps you upside the head and invites the cessation of wallowing. \u201cGet up and dance, sister,\u201d it urges. \u201cThese are the sacred days you have. What will you do with them? Make them count.\u201d<\/p>\n

I get out of bed and enter the land of the living. I wrap Christmas presents even when my chest feels tight. I turn on \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life\u201d and let its insistence work on me slowly. I carve out one-on-one time with each of my children, quiet pulse checks, intentional moments to listen, to refill love buckets that leak faster than I can fill them. I show up not because I feel light, but because I refuse to let heaviness make the decisions. \u201cA garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness,\u201d I coach myself.<\/p>\n

Joy, I am learning, is not the absence of depression. It is the refusal to grant it authority. It looks like presence. It looks like attention. It looks like choosing to live, right here, stubbornly, imperfectly.<\/p>\n

And this is why Longfellow\u2019s song stays with me. Because despair is allowed to speak, but it is not allowed to conclude.<\/p>\n

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
God is not dead, nor does He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.<\/p>\n

That is not na\u00efvet\u00e9. That is hard-fought joyful defiance. Find me in this space this Christmas.<\/p>\n

Originally published at Honest to Goodness.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women\u2019s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kaeley Harms, Wednesday, December 24, 2025Getty Images My favorite Christmas song is not one of the usual frontrunners. It isn\u2019t \u201cO Holy Night\u201d or \u201cMary Did You Know\u201d or \u201cHark the Herald Angels Sing.\u201d It\u2019s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\u2019s \u201cI Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.\u201d A few years ago, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[813,3751,1217],"class_list":{"0":"post-13893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-christian-living","8":"tag-christmas","9":"tag-defiant","10":"tag-joy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}