Those of you who are extraordinarily observant, may have noticed that I skipped out on writing a blog on the week of advent devoted to ‘peace’. This was not intentional. I really wanted to write one. I wanted to hold myself up as an example of someone who lived a life surrendered in hope and trust and therefore was able to live in the promised ‘peace beyond understanding’. But, right now, that is simply just not true. Peace is something that has largely eluded me for the past while – perhaps four months – as I wrestle and agonise over the decision about whether or not to go ahead with an aggressive and controversial set of surgeries. And, at the end of all of my specialist appointments and conflicting advice, I find myself no closer to an answer than at the beginning.

No, peace has not been something I have been able to access in this season – even though I did truly feel gifted with peace for a large part of the last year. It is linked to something deep and very raw that is still very much in process. Perhaps, one day, I will be able to write about it.

But for now, I will leave peace and focus instead on joy. Joy, strangely, has not been something to elude me in this season. There is a depth and a wonderfulness to joy that I have, truly, been able to access, at times. Like a draught of strong port wine. Or a river I can immerse myself in and be carried along by. Joy comes to me from Outside. It is not something I have to drum up within me. It is an alive thing – an entity – a movement that is going on all around me, and it is inviting us to join.

I have felt moments of almost excruciating joy in the midst of this nuclear rain. Honestly.

I am starting to learn that joy is not an emotion; it is a parallel dimension. It is a place somewhere outside of our space-time continuum, where the victory has already been won, the story has already been resolved, where it is finished. And it is a dance -the eternal victory song of heaven which is being danced right now. And we get to join in with it. It’s a very strange thing. There is literally a celebration of the culmination and completion and redemption of all things – a party – happening in some realm of the spirit that, sometimes, I can connect to. And the celebration is real. It is a place where the wounds of this life have already been healed, the sting of bitterness or regret is not even a memory. Where cancer is just something we laugh at and wonder how we could possibly have been afraid. The relief – the explosion of relief, and delight, and adoration comes in wave after never-ending wave. And sometimes, I surrender my heart to it, diving in, allowing the current to take me and swirl me into this place where death cannot touch me – or even cast a shadow. Where all I sense is this energy of LIFE pulsing through my body and, as I jump and leap try to twirl it out of me, it only grows.

And then, when I crash-land back into the strangeness of my reality, I wonder how I could have possibly accessed this place of joy. Am I crazy? Dissociative? Delusional? Or is there a real world of the spirit that has beckoned and welcomed me, has caught me up in his arms and danced with me, saturating my heart with delight and wonder?

And, as I think about this experience of joy, I am open to the idea that, perhaps I am not crazy. Perhaps my moments in this space of rejoicing are the moments when I am truly awake to reality – the ‘deeper magic’ that C.S. Lewis refers to in Narnia. Perhaps the pain and abuse and betrayal of this world is the delusion and this dance of joy is an innate language that my spirit was always meant to speak. Perhaps, there truly is a parallel universe where all is very, very well.

And then, sometimes, I have a very ordinary – or worse than ordinary – day in this very broken universe. But even as I look at the starkness of the landscape of ‘facts’ and scan reports around me, my heart remembers something of the dance. And the memory both nourishes me and increases my longing.