Passage
“Neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” — Nehemiah 8:10
Reflection
It’s easy to think family time is only worthwhile when it’s spent on something serious: resolving a pending conflict, having the hard conversation, correcting something that went wrong. And those conversations genuinely matter. But it’s just as easy, amid so much to resolve, to forget that laughing together with no other agenda also builds something real.
When the people of Israel hear the law read after years without hearing it, many of them start to weep, aware of how far they had drifted. But Nehemiah gives them a surprising instruction: don’t be sorrowful, eat, drink, share with those who have nothing prepared, “for the joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). Shared joy isn’t a distraction from the spiritual. In that moment, it’s the right response.
Proverbs puts it in almost medical terms: “a merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones” (Proverbs 17:22). A family isn’t held together only by fixing what’s broken. It’s also held together by the dinner where someone tells something funny, the joke that repeats every year, the time with no correction attached to it. That time isn’t wasted time spent waiting for the next serious conversation. It’s, in itself, part of how God designed a family to grow strong.
Prayer
Lord, thank you for the joy we sometimes forget to look for at home. Help us not to reduce family time to only what needs solving. May we also know how to laugh together, and may that shared joy be, as you promised, our strength. Amen.