Ponder: "to widen our lens"

“Almost everyone, including the well off, can be moved to care about the less fortunate and less powerful, in spite of whatever effects wealth may have on them.  Individual stories help.  Exposure helps.  Just paying attention-to the waitress, the person in the crosswalk, the cleaning staff in the corridor of the conference center—helps.  Imagination helps, too.

I know a man who runs a large, urban affiliate of Habitat for humanity, a nonprofit program in which low-income families build their own homes alongside community volunteers and then buy the houses at a reduced rate.  On the first day of construction, he tells me, retired guys from the suburbs itching to break out their power tools show up to work with the future homeowner, often a working single mom with young kids who’s never been on a construction site in her life. ‘They have nothing in common and no idea what to do with each other,’ he says.

Ponder: Joy in the "middle voice"

"Because it is so supremely intimate to oneself yet also intimately related to an other, joy is a reality best understood in the “middle voice”— that is, a reality that is not purely passive, happening to us, nor simply active, something we do; but partaking of both receptivity and dynamism. Other, equally significant phenomena in Christian life are also framed in the middle voice; the Koine word for feeling compassion is σπλαγχνίζοµαι (splagchnizomai), which is another crucial “action” that is in the middle voice; and a similar thing can be said of ελθών (elthon) “to arrive” or “to come”, which is used for the Prodigal Son’s recognition, amidst the swine, of the reality to which his life has come (of longing for the quality of life of pigs).  Hence human agency may be implicated in the achievement of joy in a slightly less indirect way than it can be in the attainment of happiness, which may be why St. Paul repeatedly exhorts people to be joyful (not happy)—e.g. Philippians 4:4 “Rejoice in the Lord always; and I say again, rejoice.")
Thus understood as an excess rapture, catching us up into a reality in the “middle voice,” joy is a sort of sacramental state: in Creation yet prompted ultimately by something beyond and before Creation, a reality simultaneously speaking of immediacy and transcendence, something done to you yet something you manifest, express, realize and participate in. Here and there, now and not yet, you and another, creation and Creator—joy can serve as a synechdoche of the Christian life as a whole.

Charles Mathewes, "Toward a Theology of Joy" (2014).