Joy is supposed to be one of the most recognizable traits of Christians. Not because believers are immune to grief, anxiety or burnout. Because the Gospel is good news, and good news does something to a person over time. It reshapes how they endure. It softens the reflex toward cynicism. It keeps hope from becoming embarrassing.
That’s the gap Christine Caine kept naming in our conversation. She wasn’t talking about Christians needing to smile more. She was talking about Christians living as if they have no spiritual traction, no interior buoyancy, no strength left for the moment we’re in.
“This makes me so happy and that’s what I hope is injected because we have just had such a long stint of darkness and chaos and division,” Caine said.
Then she put joy in a category most Christians don’t think about until it’s gone.
“I’m not the only one, but some of us would like a little bit of joy back into our life,” she said. “If the joy of the Lord is our strength, then I’m not seeing a whole lot of that out there. And I’m thinking, OK, we’re not strong.”
Strength is what you need when life keeps pressing. Without it, faith can stay intact while the person carrying it starts to feel hollow. They still believe. They still show up. They still post the verse. They live like they’re bracing for impact.
Caine said she’s spent decades pushing against the survival-only version of Christianity, the one that expects almost nothing from God now and tries to endure until heaven.
“We are not here to just survive and hope that we’re gonna make it, you know, on the other side,” she said. “But Jesus came that we might have life and life more abundant and so many Christians live so far beneath all that God has for them.”
When Christians live beneath that, Caine thinks it often starts with disappointment that never got processed. People prayed and waited. They trusted and got hurt. They built timelines in their head, then watched those timelines collapse. Over time, a quiet bargain sets in, and it feels responsible because it lowers the chance of getting crushed again.
“If I don’t have any expectation, then I won’t be disappointed,” she said.
Caine doesn’t rush past that line. She treats it like an emotional hinge. Because it explains why so many Christians stop expecting joy, stop expecting renewal, stop expecting God to make any difference in the present. Expectation starts feeling like a setup. Disappointment starts feeling inevitable. So faith gets scaled down until it can’t hurt you anymore.
That’s how the “abundant life” Jesus promised gets rebranded as something suspicious, something for people with better circumstances or stronger personalities. Christians start acting like abundance is a prosperity-gospel trap instead of a biblical category. Caine hears that hesitation and refuses to let it win.
“The misuse and the abuse of a phrase doesn’t negate the actual meaning of the phrase,” she said.
She also refuses to let “flourishing” turn into a status symbol. She’s seen too much of the world for that theology to survive.
“If I reduce flourishing to the kind of house you live in, then this is not a gospel for everyone,” she said.
Caine reaches for a picture that can’t be spun into lifestyle branding. She talked about standing in Athens on an oppressive summer day, looking up at the Parthenon, listening to a guide, and getting fixated on something small on the path: a lone olive tree, marked by a sign that called it the sacred olive tree. The mountain was hot and stripped down. Almost nothing else looked like it was thriving. The olive tree did.
“It’s beautiful, it’s green, it’s producing fruit in barren conditions,” she said.
“Barren conditions” holds the years Christians keep describing as exhausting. It holds personal grief that didn’t resolve neatly. It holds financial stress, loneliness, fractured relationships, institutional distrust, the feeling that the world has gotten harsher.
Caine said she’d been reading Psalm 52, written from the kind of moment where David is betrayed, hunted and cornered. In that psalm, David doesn’t describe his life as stable. He describes God as steady, then drops a line that sounds almost impossible in context.
“But I am like a green olive tree flourishing in the house of God,” David says.
For Caine, that sentence refuses the logic Christians often live by. The logic says flourishing comes later. Joy comes after the dust settles. Strength returns when life stops being hard. Psalm 52 treats flourishing as something that can exist inside a hard season because it’s rooted in God, not the environment.
Caine isn’t offering a motivation hack. She’s putting pressure on the way Christians have trained themselves out of expectation. She thinks many believers have normalized a numb faith and called it realism. She thinks the Church has started living as if joy is a sentimental add-on, rather than a spiritual indicator.
She doesn’t say that to shame people. She says it because she thinks the world is starving for a Christianity that is alive.
“What I’m hoping is that the olive tree will teach us in barren hard places that we were created by God to flourish,” she said.
Caine’s emphasis is on source. She keeps coming back to the idea that Christians are trying to do Christian life on human fuel and wondering why it keeps collapsing. Joy starts returning, not because people force it, but because they stop living disconnected from the thing that creates it.
“We can actually produce that fruit if we stay connected to our source Jesus and if we’re empowered by the Holy Spirit,” she said.
Caine framed what’s at stake without drama. A joyless Church doesn’t just feel bad. It communicates something.
“If we’re languishing like the world is languishing, I’m not sure that they’re going to think this is good news,” she said.
That’s not a branding critique. It’s a witness critique. When Christians sound as depleted as everyone else, the Gospel starts to sound like one more burden, one more obligation, one more thing to manage.
Caine’s point is that flourishing is a form of witness, and not the polished kind.
“I think one of the most effective witnessing tools we’ve got in the world in which we live is that Christians will be flourishing,” she said.
Caine keeps it grounded in a faith that isn’t trying to sound normal. Christianity is built on a claim that should sound impossible. She thinks Christians forget that while trying to present a respectable version of belief.
“Our faith is supernatural,” she said. “The linchpin of our faith, our entire Christian faith is predicated on the fact that a dead Jewish man rose again 2000 years ago. That is supernatural. That is not normal.”
If resurrection is true, joy isn’t childish. It’s coherent. It’s what happens when expectation gets rebuilt around a God who raises the dead. That won’t erase sorrow. It won’t delete anxiety. It will keep cynicism from owning the whole interior landscape.
The olive tree in Athens didn’t wait for the heat to lift. It stayed rooted and kept producing. Caine thinks Christians are called to the same kind of life. If the Gospel is good news, Christians should look like people who believe it.
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