Let’s make the decision to joyfully accept all situations — the lines, the traffic jams, the downed computers, and the rest — as opportunities to include God in our lives, in that moment, and then wait for the change in perception that will assuredly come.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 14-15
Happy women know that happiness is not the art of building a trouble-free life but rather the art of responding well when trouble strikes.
— Dan Baker, PhD, and Cathy Greenberg, PhD, What Happy Women Know, p. 236
God rejoices. Not because the problems of the world have been solved, not because all human pain and suffering have come to an end, nor because thousands of people have been converted and are now praising him for his goodness. No, God rejoices because one of his children who was lost has been found. What I am called to is to enter into that joy. It is God’s joy, not the joy that the world offers. It is the joy that comes from seeing a child walk home amid all the destruction, devastation, and anguish of the world. . . .
I am not accustomed to rejoicing in things that are small, hidden, and scarcely noticed by the people around me. I am generally ready and prepared to receive bad news, to read about wars, violence, and crimes, and to witness conflict and disarray. I always expect my visitors to talk about their problems and pain, their setbacks and disappointments, their depressions and their anguish. Somehow I have become accustomed to living with sadness, and so have lost the eyes to see the joy and the ears to hear the gladness that belongs to God and which is to be found in the hidden corners of the world.
Henri J. M. Nouwen — The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 114-115
Are you beginning to see now how essential joy is?
Because we live in a world at war. Because the enemy is relentless. Because we are “hard pressed on every side” (2 Corinthians 4:8). For these very reasons we need joy. Lots and lots of joy. Bucketfuls. Wagonloads. Joy can counter the effect of all this unrelenting other stuff. Without it we’ll get drained from the battle, sucked dry. We won’t have anything to draw upon. No inner reserves. We’ll waste away. Throw in the towel. Or we’ll fall into an addiction because we are absolutely starved for joy.
— John Eldredge, Walking With God, p. 114
Happy women know that saying no to others gives you the opportunity to say yes to yourself.
— Dan Baker, PhD, and Cathy Greenberg, PhD, What Happy Women Know, p. 234
Happy women know they can be rich for life if they focus more on what they have than on what they want.
— Dan Baker, PhD, and Cathy Greenburg, PhD, What Happy Women Know, p. 234
I find myself planning and working for the future, for payoffs and rewards in a month or a year, for which I am willing to pay with happiness now. Only to find of course that there is always another month, another year to wait. True, the future must be planned for, and there are surely rewards tomorrow for prudent action today. But somehow, I am learning, I must discover how to live a life of happiness today. Not someday when things quiet down and there’s enough in the bank and I’ve gotten beyond these problems — but today. The idea that we can live temporarily unhappy lives in pursuit of payday/someday, when we will be set for life and ready for happiness, is a sad illusion.
Life is of a piece. The future is woven of the thread we spin today. It is silly to imagine that a “temporary” life of tension and stress is preparing us for a future day of relaxation and peace; that a provisional life spent compromising our ideals and deferring our deepest longings will one day give way to a future of fulfillment and deep joy. It doesn’t work. “What shall it profit a man,” Jesus asked, “if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” You can’t live a soul-ebbing life and somehow pull out happiness in the end.
In a culture of achievement we naturally assume a path to happiness: get on it, do the work, and — enduring a baleful journey of indeterminate years — you will eventually arrive at bliss. But there is no path to happiness, only a path of happiness. In other words, happiness is a state, not a destination.
— David Anderson, Breakfast Epiphanies: Finding wonder in the Everyday, p. 88-89
Happy women understand that no matter what they own, they will always feel a bit insecure about having enough and being enough, but they don’t let these feelings rule their lives.
— Dan Baker, PhD, and Cathy Greenberg, PhD, What Happy Women Know, p. 234
And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that we release our grasping of life here and now. Usually through pain. God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to him. He thwarts us in our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don’t really look to God for life. Our first reaction is usually to get angry with him, which only serves to make the point. Don’t you hear people say, “Why did God let this happen?” far more than you hear them say, “Why aren’t I more fully given over to God?”
We see God as a means to an end rather than the end itself. God as the assistant to our life versus God as our life. We don’t see the process of our life as coming to the place where we are fully his and he is our all. And so we are surprised by the course of events.
It’s not that God doesn’t want us to be happy. He does. It’s just that he knows that until we are holy, we cannot really be happy. . . .
We are so committed to arranging for a happy little life that God has to thwart us to bring us back to himself. . . .
Now, I am not suggesting that God causes all the pain in our lives. . . . But pain does come, and what will we do with it? What does it reveal? What might God be up to? How might he redeem our pain? those are questions worth asking.
Don’t waste your pain.
— John Eldredge, Walking with God, p. 87-88
Every fairy tale, it seems, concludes with the bland phrase “happily ever after.” Yet every couple I have ever known would agree that nothing about marriage is forever happy. There are moments of bliss, to be sure, and lengthy spans of satisfied companionship. yet these come at no small effort, and the girl who reads such fiction dreaming her troubles will end ere she departs the altar is well advised to seek at once a rational woman to set her straight.
— Princess Ben, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock