Happiness.

I read a lot.  Avidly, some would say.  I won’t go into too much detail about the titles and genres I prefer to get lost in at this time, as it would give the people in my life  lots of new reasons to tease me. However, the scrambled thoughts behind this post are not to discuss books and my love for juvenile fantasy – whoops, there it is – but how curious it is that a book of that nature could challenge me so much.  As I recently re-read one of my favorite titles this summer, the words of the main character near the end of the story stood out to me more than in previous reads.  She says something along the lines of “You can never go back to a moment when you were truly happy.” Now, despite my love for the story as a whole, I find myself frustrated at how often I believe this thought to be true.  That my happiness is circumstantially defined and once a happy moment, or day, or weekend has passed, I can’t go back and feel it again.  And it makes me sad.  Too often do I walk away from those moments feeling hopeless instead of  delight.  Feeling gloom, instead of tenacious joy.  

Often when I have conversations with others regarding happiness, they always end up leading to discussions comparing it joy – all coming to a version of the conclusion that one feeling is a gift and the other a choice. Now, I recognize the need to choose joy at times when it may be difficult, and that doing so would change my attitude when faced with sadness. But that is not my focus here. It is in those fleeting, happy moments that I have found a challenge; one that manifests itself in the choice I have to see past the moment itself.  To look beyond towards the greater whole. 

As I’ve processed this over the last few weeks, a new understanding of  this  “greater whole” has begun to take shape in my mind.  When I reminisce of happy moments passed I should not focus on the reality that they ended, but that they were a taste of what is yet to come.  That such moments are only a glimpse, a snapshot if you will, of a great love taking hold of our lives.  The love of a Creator.

C.S. Lewis wrote in his work Till We Have Faces, "It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."  I find myself drawn in by such a longing.  A desire to see and to know the source of all things good.  

My hope for myself and my challenge for you is that we will heed such a call.  That when we experience great moments of pure, unadulterated happiness we will recognize the beckon to something greater, and journey forward in hope seeking the One who called.  That such moments will not taste bittersweet in our mouths, but instead fill our lips with that tenacious joy I mentioned earlier.  For happy moments alone can not sustain us.  Only Christ can.  And He has many more snapshots to show us, and many more empty album pages to fill...