I am sure someone somewhere today will remark that Christmas is a time for children. It's an engaging truth, but only half the story. Perhaps it's truer to say that Christmas can speak to the child within us all. Adults, when weighed down with worries, sometimes fail to see the joy in simple things, where children do not.

A Christian is never bored or sad. Rather, the one who loves Christ is full of joy and radiates joy.

Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures, even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that, when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.

Let us sing as we go. May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope.

Finally an evangelizing community is filled with joy; it knows how to rejoice always.

The human heart desires joy. We all desire joy, every family, every people aspires to happiness. But what is the joy that the Christian is called to live out and bear witness to? It is the joy that comes from the closeness of God, from his presence in our life. From the moment Jesus entered into history, with his birth in Bethlehem, humanity received the seed of the Kingdom of God, like the soil receives the seed, the promise of a future harvest.