Finding Joy in a Sad World
A practical guide to recovering wonder when everything feels heavy
I was doom-scrolling last week when a video stopped me in my tracks. A mom was holding her baby in the kitchen, and every time she smashed a clove of garlic with the flat side of her knife, her baby erupted in uncontrollable belly laughs. Over and over again…smash, laugh, smash, laugh. The kind of laugh that takes over their whole little body, the kind that makes you forget everything else exists. If you haven’t seen it…enjoy:
I didn’t just smile. I laughed. Hard. This was exactly what I needed to remember that the world isn’t only breaking news and heartbreak. Sometimes it’s garlic and giggles, and that matters more than we think.
Why We’ve Forgotten How to Celebrate Small Things
We live in a culture that treats joy like a luxury item we can’t afford yet. We guilt ourselves into thinking we don’t deserve it while the world burns, while our to-do lists grow, while we haven’t become the people we think we should be. Joy becomes something we’ll get to later, after we’ve earned it through enough productivity or pain or progress.
But here’s what I’m learning: joy isn’t what comes after the heavy lifting. Joy is what makes the lifting possible. When we starve ourselves of wonder, we don’t become more serious or effective…we just become more brittle. We start to crack under the weight of a world that feels increasingly impossible to carry.
The Theology of Paying Attention
Jesus had this way of pulling our gaze back to the ordinary and insisting it was sacred. He said, “Consider the lilies of the field” when his disciples were spiraling about tomorrow’s troubles. He noticed sparrows when everyone else was focused on empires. He kept pointing to mustard seeds and lost coins and dinner parties, as if God might be hiding in the most mundane moments of our lives.
The Psalms declare that “the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord,” and I think that includes kitchen counters and baby laughter just as much as mountains and oceans. The early church believed that God can meet us in anything ordinary and it suddenly becomes extraordinary. That divine love doesn’t just live in cathedrals or scripture verses, but in the space between a knife hitting garlic and a baby losing it with delight.
Joy as Holy Rebellion
When Nehemiah told the grieving Israelites that “the joy of the Lord is your strength,” he wasn’t offering them a greeting card platitude. He was giving them a survival strategy for people whose world had been torn apart. Because when everything feels unbearably heavy, joy becomes an act of resistance. It’s a refusal to let despair have the final word about what it means to be human.
Laughing at garlic smashes doesn’t ignore the pain of the world or pretend everything is fine. It keeps us human enough to face the darkness without going numb, and tender enough to keep caring without burning out. Joy reminds us that we’re still alive in a world that often feels designed to deaden us.
Small Practices for Big Wonder
Learning to notice small joys is like learning any other spiritual discipline…it takes intention and practice.
Name the joy.
When something small makes you smile, don’t dismiss it as trivial or feel guilty for enjoying it while other people suffer. Name the joy out loud. Tell someone about it. Write it down. Make it matter by treating it like it matters.
Make space for wonder.
Take walks without headphones sometimes, letting your attention wander to whatever catches it. Pause before dinner and share one thing that delighted you today with whoever will listen. Keep a wonder journal and watch how it slowly rewires your brain to look for beauty instead of just problems. Create space in your life for the kind of presence that can catch garlic giggles and recognize them as gifts.
Refuse guilt.
Don’t apologize for joy in hard times. Remind yourself that you don’t have to earn it…you deserve it. It’s okay to find joy in seasons of struggle.
The Revolution of Ordinary Delight
That baby’s belly laugh reminded me that small joys aren’t small at all…they’re what keep our souls stitched together in a world that feels increasingly frayed. They’re how we remember that the God who paints lilies and counts sparrows is still here, still laughing with us in kitchens, still giving us moments of pure delight to make the heavy world a little lighter.
So, the next time you’re doom-scrolling and stumble across something that makes you smile, don’t apologize for it. Let it save you for a moment. Let it remind you that wonder is still possible, that joy is still holy, and that sometimes the most profound theology happens in the space between a knife and a clove of garlic and a baby who thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world.
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Thank you. I needed to hear all that this morning. ❤️
Thank you. I needed this today. 💖