Tag doing versus being

Continuing our discussion of “doing” and “being” and where happiness and success fits in, if it does.

First, of all, we will never achieve happiness by trying to be happy. We can’t “think” our way into happiness even though we certainly can “think” our way into misery. Funny how that works.

Happiness usually sneaks up on us. We don’t find happiness,

happiness finds US.

It finds us when:

 we feel loved and accepted

 

when we are engaged in any pursuit we truly love

 

when we are helping others,

 

 and when we are at peace with God

(I’m aware that not everyone agrees with the last part.)

I would imagine we could all come up with our own list but I’ll bet most of them would fit somewhere within the above criteria.

We cannot pursue happiness as the Declaration of Independence states, or so we think it states. (Defining happiness was not the goal of the authors. The goal was to limit government intrusion and interference with that pursuit.)

In my own life, I find I’m the happiest when I’m not thinking about being happy. In fact, I’m happiest when I’m not thinking about myself at all!

Reading the Sermon on the Mount, I am reminded and chagrined that Jesus never considered mankind’s happiness a priority.  For Someone whose whole life was spent for others, whose main message was love, this seems a little shortsighted.

So was Jesus shortsighted when He didn’t add happiness to His reservoir of miracles?  When He was healing, why didn’t He include healing from unhappiness? Was anyone brought to Jesus for such healing? If there was, I certainly don’t remember ever reading about it.

(I re-read the Sermon on the Mount in it’s totality once I started writing this series. I was right, happiness as we have come to consider it, is never addressed by Jesus when delivering this particular sermon. Then I re-read the ten commandments. Again, happiness not a subject. While the word IS used in Scripture it’s used differently than what we expect.)

Here’s what I think.

Happiness as an entity all by itself, isn’t addressed in scripture because it wasn’t necessary.  Our happiness or lack of it is not something God is responsible for. Let me repeat.

Our happiness, or lack of it, is not something God is responsible for,

God has given us all the information we need to be happy.