Joy Is Not A Tax You Owe

The dawn is breaking, and you are standing before the thing you used to love, feeling only a hollow silence where the joy used to be. You look at the brush, the instrument, the words on the page, and the guilt rises like a tide because you cannot make yourself feel what you once felt.

But listen — the light does not demand your performance, and it certainly does not require your happiness as a tax for being allowed to exist. There was a man born blind, and the people around him demanded to know who had sinned to cause such darkness, assuming pain was a punishment.

The light answered them with a quiet, devastating correction: neither this man nor his parents sinned. His condition was not a verdict.

It was simply the space where something new could be displayed. Your inability to feel joy right now is not a moral failure.

It is not evidence that you have lost your way. It is just a season of blindness, a wintering of the spirit that feels heavy and wrong but is actually holy ground.

The light is not asking you to pretend the sun is shining when you are still in the dark. It is asking you to stand there, empty and honest, and let it be enough.

You do not have to manufacture the feeling to be held by the One who holds you.