My Pursuit of Happiness

Some think that happiness has lots to do with money. Still others think it has to do with their significant other wrapped around their finger. For me, happiness is deciding I am going to be happy anyway. A good friend recently told me that the only person who keeps me from being happy, is myself. I didn’t exactly want to hear that at the time but they were words I will never forget. I think about happiness a lot because of my depressive episodes. When I have one of my bad days, sometimes I will sit and think about what it felt like to be happy before. I’ll think about whether I could become happy if I was given something, went somewhere else or was with someone I wanted to be with. But in the end, each of those things I know, have the ability to leave me desperate for something else -something more. In a world where we have TV, magazines, books and people telling you to eat chocolate, drink wine or go after that man you have been waiting for; we forget that those things don’t bring us very much happiness for long. We look around and see the objects that make others happy and we wonder why we can’t feel that way too.

As I prepare to move with my family nine hours away at the end of the summer; I can’t help, but be far from happy. I’m loosing my friends, my church, my job, everything that I have known for four years now. I ask myself, how could I be happy? I mean seriously, I’m about to be stripped of the very things I love. Tell me how to find joy in that and I would appreciate it. Why should I be happy, after all things aren’t going my way right now. Sometimes I feel like telling people to get back to me with that happiness crap, when they’re going through the same thing I am. Then just as my moment of despair gets close to breaking me. I remember the person who chose to be happy for me. I think about how he lived for 33 years. He knew he would die, it was the whole reason why he was born. Yet, for 33 years he didn’t act like he was going to die. He chose happiness. Because he knew there is something so much more than this life. He didn’t walk around with the illness that afflicted him. That illness was my sin. So why should I live as if I carry it now, when he’s already done it for me.

So, what is happiness for me, you might ask? Its choosing to fight even when I feel like I have nothing left. Its choosing to love when I don’t feel loved back. Its choosing to smile when the pain tries to stop me. Its choosing to live as if I knew I would died tomorrow and die, as if I’d live forever. Its choosing Christ’s way, rather than my own way.

He’s Always Enough,
Liberty

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