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By Mike Mason
 A few years ago Canadian writer Mike Mason (author of The Mystery of Marriage, The Gospel According to Job, etc.) launched what he called "an experiment in joy": he made up his mind to be joyful in the Lord every day for 90 days. A moody person by nature, for him this was a radical experiment that changed his life. Throughout the 90 days he kept a journal, which eventually became a book on joy entitled Champagne for the Soul.
What follows is the first of a series of 10 excerpts from that book (now in a new edition by Regent College Publishing, available through Amazon.ca).
Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Psalm 51:8
Do you have a favorite chair, a place you feel most at home and comfortable? So does joy. Joy's favorite chair is your sadness, your weakness, your grief. Wherever your wounds are most tender, joy finds a soft place to settle. A lighthearted person may rejoice, but no one has greater capacity for joy than one who is, like our Savior, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering (Isaiah 53:3). Joy loves our brokenness best.
One day in October, just before I began my experiment in joy, I received news that two teenage boys, the only children of friends of ours, had been killed in a car accident. This tragedy stunned me. These boys and their parents were exemplary Christians; no dangerous driving was involved, and no alcohol or drugs. The accident came with no warning, no apparent cause, no reason.
That night I lay awake, grieving and trying to process this disaster. Towards dawn, quite suddenly, the idea came to me to conduct a ninety-day experiment in joy. Coming out of the blue, this idea seemed not just irrelevant but wildly inappropriate. I was in no mood to rejoice. I thought of putting off the experiment until January, reasoning that a resolution to be joyful would make a good New Year's project. But the thing wouldn't be postponed; it had an energy of its own that carried me along, and the next day I began. I felt sure this was God's idea, not mine.
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From the beginning, then, this project was all mixed up with suffering and loss. In fact I dedicated my book on joy to those two boys, Jo‘l and Daniel. To dedicate a book is not just a matter of writing a name and some nice words. No, my book could not have been written without these boys. Like a muse, they accompanied me throughout my journey, and I feel their inspiration is somehow infused on every page.
Though at first this mingling of joy and tragedy made no sense, gradually I saw the wisdom of it. I came to understand three things in the course of my experiment.
First, Jo‘l and Daniel are in heaven now, entirely happy with Jesus. Who better to inspire a book on joy than two saints who are drinking their fill of it right now and will forevermore?
Second, I saw that I deeply needed these boys, along with their grieving parents, to rescue me from the greatest danger of happiness, which is complacency. The one problem with happiness is its subtle tendency to distance one from worldly reality, especially from others who are unhappy. Sometimes during the writing of this book, when I happened to be with someone who was depressed or troubled, a cold shadow would pass through me upon realizing that I couldn't sympathize. I was too happy! And then I would recall Jo‘l and Daniel and their parents; and this holy family, half in heaven and half on earth, would restore human warmth to my heart.
Finally, I saw that if joy does not arise out of the midst of tragedy, it will not arise at all. Christian joy is rooted in darkness, chaos, meaninglessness, sorrow. Such joy isn't just an airy ideal but a hard reality inextricably enmeshed with conditions in the real world. Separate joy from sorrow and there's nothing left. I had so much wanted happiness to be tidier than this, cleaner and more innocent. True happiness, however, is like our physical bodies, tidy on one side the outer and messy on the other. The happiest thought in the world is the shed blood of Christ.
September 13/2007
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