LTN Advent Calendar 2021: Joy and Tabletop Roleplay

Each week, as we make our way through this Advent season, LTN Writers will provide short nerdy devotionals for you and your family to enjoy. You can find them all here. Also, if you want more nerdy advent content, check out our Advent Calendar from 2018. Our third Advent devotional centers on the joy of Christ’s coming.

I think, if nothing else, nerds understand Joy. To love something, to enjoy something, is at the core of what we do. We immerse ourselves in it. We advocate it to others. We want our joy to catch like fire, spreading out to our friends and families and even strangers, drawing them into the weird but beloved things we have found.

For me, it’s tabletop RPGs. My personal, professional, and social life has left dozens of new roleplayers in its wake. I started a Youth group Pathfinder and a pastor’s group D&D. I even started a homebrew (or original) Weird West game just for my in-laws. When I like something, I want to share it with the people I like. The joy I find in it overflows into sharing.

Joy is also central to the Christmas story. The folks who experienced it first hand couldn’t help sharing about the wondrous things they had heard and seen, this good news that a savior had come into the world. That God was with them in a new and powerful way. We can see this in Luke 2:17–21:

And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

Every year my church likes to end our Christmas candlelight service with “Go Tell It On The Mountain.” Our last charge of Advent brings us back to Joy, to be filled with so much light and love that you have to carry it out the doors and share it with the world.