“Choose joy.” You have seen it. It is on coffee mugs, throw pillows, and at least one wooden sign in every farmhouse-style kitchen in America. Depending on when you hear it, it is either good advice or the two most irritating words in the English language. Said by someone who has been through real hardship and come out the other side still grateful, it can sound like wisdom. Said to someone standing at a graveside, three weeks into a depression, or the day after a layoff, it can sound more like, “Could you please be sad somewhere else?” So here is the question: Is joy something Christians actually choose? Or is “choose joy” just a polite way of telling hurting people to get over it? Neither answer quite works. Scripture does call believers to rejoice. It even commands it. But Scripture also describes joy as something God gives, and it makes a surprising amount of room for grief, lament, anger, and the honest recognition that the world is badly broken. If we are going to say anything us...
What we usually call freedom is, I suspect, mostly insulation from consequences, and wealth happens to be very good at buying insulation. It gets you out of the line. It turns a disastrous mistake into a mildly expensive one. None of that is quite freedom, which becomes obvious once you look at a king. He seems like the least constrained man in the realm until you start counting what he answers to, beginning with his own status and ending somewhere around the fear that it could all slide. At least his servants get their evenings off. So I’d define freedom a little differently. It has less to do with commanding people than with how few obligations you’re carrying that you never really chose. Each one stakes a claim on your future time. Debt, for instance, wants you back next month and the month after. Even luxuries nibble; the vacation home needs insurance and someone to check on it, and it also moves into the back of your head rent-free. Plenty of wealthy people collect obligations fas...