I’ve probably been depressed all my life. How else does one explain the nine-year-old kid who sat on the playground bench and wrote after-the-nuclear-holocaust short stories? Nevertheless, it’s what I did. But depression doesn’t fit easily within the Christian template. “Consider it all joy,” the apostle Paul writes, “when you encounter various trials.” I struggle not to curl up into the fetal position.

It’s also why I love my friend John Reuben. John has led, as they say, a colorful life. He grew up in a trailer park, where his mom ran a Christian Death Metal record label out of her living room. I’m going to guess that she may be unique in the annals of Christian music. And she brought up her kid to be a maverick, and by the time he was nineteen years old John had recorded several hip-hop EPs, started his own record label, shepherded new music from several new bands, and moved out to Hollywood for movie and television work.

Since then he’s been a well-known artist in the Christian music industry, and has performed all over the world. He also has a melancholy streak a mile wide, and perhaps that’s the real point of connection for a shy, slouching-toward-senility music writer and a young, brash, flamboyant musician who’s down with the kids. In any event, we get together every couple months, laugh, catch up on our frequently divergent paths, and puzzle over what to make of lives that are full of unfathomable mystery.

John has a new album called Sex, Drugs, and Self Control. I suspect the title will not endear him to the youth pastors of America. It’s the latest salvo in an increasingly complex body of work that struggles to be authentic in an industry that doesn’t always prize authenticity.

It’s got the usual hip-hop beats, but it’s more organic and genre-defying and collage-like, more Beck than Eminem. It’s also a wondrous piece of musical theater; a funny, ironic commentary on image and fame, and a soul-searching inventory of the man who still has to live with himself when he puts the in-your-face persona away. Then there is this:

Make a joyful noise
Clapping broken hands
Feelin’ overwhelmed, standin’ outside myself
I’ll be right here
Going nowhere, waiting patiently
Faith is a gift
Clarity is terrifying

That’s from a song called “Joyful Noise,” which closes the album. I don’t know why the apostle Paul deigned to include joy as one of the fruits of the Spirit. It’s never made sense to me. Joy is for the televangelists, for the singers of schmaltz-laden choruses, with their beehive hairdos and their beatific fake smiles. But maybe, if joy is what John Reuben says it is, I can live with it.

John is 30 years old now—ancient in the surreal world of big Christian music festivals, in the Disneyland county fair culture where the buses pull up and disgorge the youth groups in their matching T-shirts. His first kid is on the way. His previous album didn’t sell that well. On his last tour the audiences were smaller, the reaction was more muted.

The last time we met we sat in a Mexican restaurant, a generation apart and unfathomably, miraculously together. We laughed and goofed around and finally gave in to the melancholy pull. He was an aging rapper, doing the only thing he knew how to do, trying to face the new realities of a music industry where nobody buys music anymore, and where everybody downloads whatever they want for free. I was an aging writer, doing the only thing I know how to do, trying to face the new realities of a journalistic and corporate world where writing isn’t valued anymore. It’s just typing. We were both haunted by the unspoken question: what do we do now?

I hadn’t heard Sex, Drugs, and Self-Control at that point. But listening to it over the past few days I know that John has found an answer, and it’s an answer that I’ll appropriate for myself as well. We’ll make a joyful noise. We’ll clap our broken hands and make a holy racket, in the face of all the doubt and uncertainty and the terrifying clarity of authentic vision. We’ll be thankful for the gift.

Perhaps this is just the depression talking. I know Christians who would assure me that I’m lacking faith, that God has a bright future in store for me. I don’t know that. I assume no such thing, at least on broken planet Earth. For whatever reasons, my mind drifts away from the happy, prosperous, neatly-coiffed televangelists and toward the poor yobs who were crucified upside down and sawn in two.

It’s not a message that gets a lot of airplay: you may have to, and probably will, suffer for Christ, or suffer merely because you live on the same broken planet as everybody else. That’ll have ’em streaming through the church doors, won’t it?

But maybe, John Reuben seems to suggest, it comes with the territory. In any case, suffering is the not the final word. Maybe joy and brokenness can coexist, and are not mutually exclusive. It’s a lesson that my friend proposes—tentatively, hesitantly, in the face of the upbeat youth groups who want an upbeat message. We’ll both see if he’s right.

In the meantime, I’m thankful for an unlikely friendship, for camaraderie and laughter in the midst of uncertainty, for broken hands and broken lives that make a joyful noise.