“Are you happy now?!”
What comes to your mind when you hear or read that question?
Many times I remember a story from one of my grandchildren’s visits to the other grandmother’s house years ago. While I have forgotten the details of this particular story, I always recall with a grin the word-induced picture my mind draws of what it must have looked like when my then-three-or-four year old grandson asked the kitty cat that question.
Seems that some kind of struggle was playing itself out when he picked up the kitty by the scruff of the neck, and placing his sweet face near the cat’s face and looking with his beautiful blue eyes solidly locked on the cat’s green eyes, asked with some force: “Are you happy now?!?”
Which of us have not been caught in a life-struggle of some stripe when we haven’t thought the question, even if we did not voice it out loud?
What would it mean to be truly “happy” in this life? What would be required for me to be ‘happy,’ I wonder to myself this morning. How important is “happy” anyway?
My devotional from Our Daily Bread for today, written by Julie Ackerman Link, carries two questions: “Are parents trying too hard to make their kids happy?” “And is that having the opposite effect?”
This was in connection with an article written by Lorri Gottlieb on “the subject of unhappy young adults.” The author’s conclusion was “Yes” to both questions.
The idea in the devotional is that the “easy life” (absent of trials and difficulties and failure of any kind) would make any one truly happy is based on the mistaken belief that God, “the Lord will be the kind of parent who protects them from all sorrow and disappointment.”
When folks find out that is not the case, they may become disappointed with the Lord our God, though a faithful reading of His word reveals that He never promised an ‘easy’ life. “He lovingly allows His children to go through suffering (Isa. 43:2; 1 Thess. 3:3).”
Ms. Link writes, “God’s goal is to make us holy, not just happy (1 Thess. 3:13). And when we are holy, we are more likely to be truly happy and content.”
The focus for me today is that “mistaken beliefs” give all of us (children and adults, alike) “a false view of the world.” And, when we base our life on any belief system not founded and grounded in God’s Holy Word, the Bible, we are in for some serious and very faulty views about life.
We might even miss the real truth that being “happy” is not the most important part of life, and that the truth about being happy is that it isn’t nearly as important as being “holy.”
And, while the Bible has a lot to say about happiness and holiness, it teaches that “without holiness no one will see God” (See Hebrews 12:14 NKJV.)
Ms. Link’s devotional ends with this poem:
“Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease,
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?” – Watts.
And with this phrase: “A contented person has learned to accept the bitter with the sweet.”
Reminds me that I battle the desired preference of always the sweet, never the bitter, please!
I so love milk chocolate and can stand only a bite or two of deep, dark, pure bittersweet chocolate. And, then only when paired with sweet tea or smooth and sweet chocolate coffee!
It’s the same with my preferences for life: no tangled webs of difficulty, please! Only the smooth, high road for me, my Father. I am delicate, You know, and love to live in comfort and convenience. I say this lightly, and only with half-truth, for I do prefer that, but know that is in stark opposition to what the Lord God calls forth from His children.
Which always reminds me of Dr. Charles Stanley’s faithful admonition that the Christian life can only be lived out in and by God’s biblical principles, not our lives’ preferences.
May God continue to hold us up by His faithfulness and fill our hearts with love for Him and for each other.
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