St. Patrick Presbyterian Church, Epc

Today as we were touching base in the Starbucks line (our unofficial “southern campus”), Jim told me with great enthusiasm that he’d just ended a yearlong “stoic standoff” with my two-year-old by finally getting the boy to laugh. It’s true: Donovan is not one to warm quickly and is less and less inclined the harder one tries to draw him out. Jim swears the apple has not fallen far from my tree in that regard. Now I’m perhaps not as “stoic” as Jim often jokes I am (compared to a sanguine character like him, who isn’t a little melancholy!?), but he’s right that I’m not aptly described as a “jolly” fellow. I prefer dark chocolate, stout beers, and Russian novels. Just the idea of being forced to stir myself into a happy frenzy makes me very, very tired. The more superficial marks of gladness notwithstanding, I do believe it’s possible to experience the joy of the Lord as a more reserved human being, and I suspect it has something to do with being able to engage the messiness of reality in a way that the Psalms