An old, broken music box made its way into our house, and before I could hide it in the bin destined for the thrift store, the boys intercepted it. And they’re fascinated. They don’t care that it wobbles on one foot because the other three are missing, or that the mechanism busted sometime in the last 35 years of disuse so that it only works when you force the cylinder drum to turn.

Kav asked how it makes the different notes of the song, and I pointed to the little strips of metal comb that flick against the raised braille-like spots on the rolling drum, each making their own sound because of their different lengths. He sat next to me on the couch and forced the music to play in sporadic rhythm while I read about Nehemiah.

I love the story of Nehemiah. When you look around and see so much brokenness that needs fixed or rebuilt, it’s encouraging to see that someone else has accomplished this on a massive scale in spite of vile opposition.

If you’re not familiar, the book of Nehemiah overlaps with Ezra (fun fact: they used to be one book) and they both cover the story of the Israelites returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding after the devastation of Babylonian invasion, circa 450 BC.

The walls are down. They’re unprotected. Nefarious characters oppose their efforts. The people are spread out and vulnerable. And there’s rubble everywhere.

In Judah it was said, “The strength of those who bear the burdens is failing. There is too much rubble. By ourselves we will not be able to rebuild the wall.”

– Nehemiah 4:14

I know, it’s all totally unrelated to life right now; I don’t even know why I’m talking about this.

Repairing the walls could, for us, mean many things: reforming education, restoring family wholeness, repairing our physical health, shoring up our Bible knowledge, removing corrupt leaders. It’s close and personal, but it’s also broad and cultural. Our habits are influenced by our generally excessive and deceptive media consumption. We are tired and distracted and overwhelmed, often at the expense of taking care of our communities, stewarding the space around us, and even knowing who our neighbors are.

Some of us were broken after years of disuse, and we stopped working, too. It takes a lot of pushing to get us to play, to force the music out. But the music is still there, inside, waiting.

I had a long conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago about difficult seasons in motherhood and ministry, and the complications that come into play (or more accurately, that come against our play) when those seasons move from hard to devastating, and we fight depression. This isn’t an easy thing to write about for a broad audience because the internet is full of weirdos and quasi-Christians and armchair quarterbacks, but I already wrote a book about my own experience with this so I’m gonna trust you all here.

Also, depending on where you come from (i.e., our experiences and circumstances), it’s easy to take a religiously shallow view of joy. The person who’s never experienced great loss or sacrifice has a hard time identifying with those who have, and when they encounter someone who’s broken they face a fork in the road that forces them to choose between humble compassion or proud religious cliches. One side admits it doesn’t understand or have all the answers, and the other pretends it does while moralizing ignorant drivel that is really no help at all.

Job recognized, as only a person in pain can do, that simple answers not only fail to relieve pain, they can literally drive a person further away from God.

– Dr. Henry Cloud, Changes That Heal

In the early years of our endeavors – like parenting, adopting, ministry, business – do we know anything about anything? We’re just doing our best with whatever work we’ve put our hands to.

And when we see that our work is working (the kid is obeying, the sickness is healing, the sales are coming in, the people are growing, progress is happening) then work becomes play. Hope and expectation make work into a playground, because our efforts are rewarded with fruitfulness. The little dopamine hits of motivation go a long way. Things are going great, we think, I must be pretty good at this.

She did not know anything about gardening, but the grass seemed so thick in some of the places where the green points were pushing their way through that she thought they did not seem to have room enough to grow….She went from place to place, and dug and weeded, and enjoyed herself so immensely that she was led on from bed to bed and into the grass under the trees. The exercise made her so warm that she first threw her coat off, and then her hat, and without knowing it she was smiling down on to the grass and the pale green points all the time.

– Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

It works, we realize. If I push this button, then this happens. Maybe it doesn’t do it with perfect predictability, but it does it pretty much every time. So of course we keep on doing it.

But what if we push the button and nothing happens? Well, maybe things in the background are happening. So we wait, and keep pushing, and wait some more. We know these things take time. We know God has a plan. The details are more complex than what we can see on the surface. So we keep trying…and trying. And sometimes it works, and we keep going.

But other times, for a long time, we don’t see anything happening. We still push the buttons, but without enthusiasm or energy. The playground has turned into a penal institution, and what used to be play has become drudgery.

And that’s when we stop. We stop expecting, we stop hoping, we stop going. We stop working.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
    but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

– Proverbs 13:12

When I was talking to my friend, I told her how I came to a slow realization in my own brokenness that I actually had a valid need for happiness, and it was such a pivot point for learning to conquer depression.

We tend to think of happiness as an extra – it’s nice, of course, but truly hard-core Christians can go without it; it’s a perk if you get it, but totally not necessary. We concede to joy, yes, because joy has more spiritual connotations and we know it’s mentioned in really important things like the fruit of the Spirit, but then we make hair-splitting efforts to separate joy from happiness, as though they’re not really the same thing. Because, they say (whoever “they” are) you can have joy without being happy…but really, can you?

I don’t think so; it’s just rhetoric. Once you take the spiritual spin off it, that’s like saying you can have rage without having anger. And when you’re fighting for the motivation and ability to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, those kinds of hollow arguments might make the speaker feel clever about themselves for a minute but they’re a total waste of time for those of us trying to navigate darkness.

But joy isn’t based on circumstances, some will argue. And that can be true, but it doesn’t nullify the related truth that circumstances change our outlook and perspective on things. God cares about our circumstances. So we need to shift our gaze from arguing about words to actually solving problems, and one of the big problems is that many Christians have a hard time feeling okay about being happy.

The need for happiness flies in the face of any legalism we grew up with, because in those circles we’re mostly taught to quietly suffer for Jesus because God loves us very much and has a miserable plan for our lives.

Instead of experiencing the full gospel, we settle for the self-righteous parts that make us look good and pious, and make excuses for the parts that other people might judge us for if we lived them out too loudly.

(Quick side note: If we diminish our faith and understanding of God to meet the approval of others, we are succumbing to fear of man rather than fear of God…and that’s idolatry.)

In shunning one extreme, I fell for the other, and needed to find equilibrium again. But when I realized I needed to be happy, I also realized there was something more to “the joy of the Lord is our strength” than trite religious sentiment. I needed to see that what I was expending myself for was actually worthwhile, and that my pain had a purpose. I needed to rediscover important things like laughter and beauty.

If I was called to push that button, I had a genuine need to see something light up or make some noise. Because my life had value and God wasn’t calling me to waste it in futility.

It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
    to sing praises to your name, O Most High;
to declare your steadfast love in the morning,
    and your faithfulness by night,
to the music of the lute and the harp,
    to the melody of the lyre.
For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
    at the works of your hands I sing for joy.

– Psalm 92:1-4

My friend told me about this group of moms she was once a part of – ambitious moms, doing-all-the-things moms. And she realized that the kids in this group didn’t need their moms to do more things; they didn’t need better activities or more resources. They needed happier moms. They needed more peaceful, less stressed-out moms. They needed their moms to have a stronger mom culture.

But it’s not just a mom thing; we all need a stronger culture. We all have personal and cultural walls that need fixing. They broke down when we stopped working, but what if we could figure out how to make the work feel like play again, and we started rebuilding?

In hard, broken seasons, too often we make excuses for the music not playing. We tell ourselves it’s not necessary because there are so many other important things to be focused on. So we sit in the quiet and the quiet gets louder, and we forget that we were made for joy and purpose.

But the Holy Spirit is calling us to push that drum a little, and see what notes come out. Remember who you are, Love, He says. Remember the things you used to delight in, the things I made you to light up over. Do not neglect the joy inside you; pursue it so others will see its fruit.

…She could not believe that she had been working two or three hours. She had been actually happy all the time; and dozens and dozens of the tiny, pale green points were to be seen in cleared places, looking twice as cheerful as they had looked before when the grass and weeds had been smothering them.

“I shall come back this afternoon,” she said, looking all round at her new kingdom, and speaking to the trees and the rose-bushes as if they heard her.

– Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

When Kavanagh turns the wheel, he doesn’t know he’s working to make the music come out. The music is his motivation; he pushes the drum and joy emerges. If it didn’t make music, he wouldn’t bother turning it. He would abandon it and find something else to do.

In our own situations, we look around, exhausted and overwhelmed at these broken areas, but God has buried music in the rubble.

So we ask Him to help us find it, help us push the wheel, help us hear. And we begin to pick up on faint strains:

Five minutes of peaceful conversation in an otherwise strained relationship.

The ability to calmly stand up for ourselves in a conflict.

Four hours of solid sleep when we’d only been getting scraps of rest.

A text from a friend who is praying for us. And the Holy Spirit reminding us to pray for another friend, and to send them an encouraging text, too.

And then we start noticing other things, and we have the strength to rebuild in other ways. Smaller things like giving better eye contact, or picking up trash as we walk, or eating fruit instead of sugar. The shy person is brave and says hello, the lethargic person reads something a little harder than they’re used to. The dad figures out how to fix the music box…or the mom finally remembers to take the bin to the thrift store.

We’re all on our own part of the wall, building and rebuilding, making our own sound, cleaning up the rubble. These are the notes we play. There’s joy – yes, happiness – in these tiny accomplishments, and music emerges as we feel the wheel moving under our fingertips.

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P.S. If you’re curious about the story of Nehemiah, The Bible Project has a great 8-minute video here.

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