My Happiness Habit

I want to grow into a person who is characterized by deep contentment, the habit of happiness.

I started last weekend by thinking through the command to "Rejoice ... always"  I decided to focus on the sunny side of things.  About 10 minutes into Friday evening I discovered that rejoicing always was not as easy for me as I thought it would be.  There were little bumps.  It was nothing major.  The kids argued.  My husband and I had slightly different ideas about the best ways to respond to them.  We were all a bit on edge.  I realized that I was not rejoicing.  I hated the turmoil, even though it was minor turmoil.  Ripples in the household put me in turmoil.  I longed to hide for a long time, all weekend even, in a quiet place with a good book and a lot of chocolate.  Clearly, I still have much to learn about contentment.

I have had happiness on my mind for a while now.  I picked up the book The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  The author decided that she wanted to be happier.  She studied research on what makes people happy and set herself ambitious goals to achieve happiness.  Each month she focused on a different aspect of happiness.  She rated her success and charted her progress.

I was intrigued, maybe she had discovered the keys to happiness.  Does having a clean closet really make a person happier?  I wouldn't know... A short way into the book I started to feel vaguely uncomfortable with its approach.  I realized that I could never follow Gretchen's lead.  For one thing I hate charts.  Her set-a-goal-and-measure-your-progress way of doing things simply doesn't fit me. Besides, being orderly and disciplined about happiness felt wrong somehow. Shouldn't happiness just bubble up from the inside? I knew there was more to my discomfort than personality differences between Gretchen Rubin and myself, but I wasn't sure what the problem was.  I picked up Walking with God by John Eldredge. Something John said triggered an "aha moment" for me.  I suddenly understood my discomfort with The Happiness Project .

You can't possibly master enough principles and disciplines to ensure that your life works out.  You weren't meant to, and God won't let you.  For he knows that if we succeed without him, we will be infinitely further from him.  We will come to believe terrible things about the universe--things like I can make it on my own and If only I try harder, I can succeed. That whole approach to life--trying to figure it out, beat the odds, get on top of your game--it is ...entirely without God.  He is nowhere in those considerations.  That sort of scrambling smacks more of the infamous folks who raised the tower of Babel than it does of those who walked with God in the garden in the cool of the day.  In the end, I'd much rather have God.

Gretchen tried to figure out how to make life work.  She came up with some useful tidbits. But no checklist, even a thoroughly researched checklist, could make a person content at the core.

However,  I don't want to give up.  I still want to be characterized by deep contentment, the habit of being happy.

I decided to go back to Philippians 4:4-9. 

One reason my "sunny side" approach didn't work was that I mentally deleted the key phrase from the passage.  "Rejoice in the Lord always." The fact that the waters of my life are not always as placid as I would like them to be is a gift.  That way I remember that, at root, I am rejoicing in the Lord, and not merely in the gifts he gives me, not even the tremendous gift of a beautiful family.  Sometimes I get things twisted around and I act like God's job is to make me happy. He wants me to be happy, but more than that He knows that what I really long for is love.  I long to experience God's love for me and love him back.  Nothing less than that will be a stable enough foundation.  Nothing less lasts.