Not long ago, we had a conversation in my living room with Nan, a delightful seventy-year-old Christian lady who had traveled from out of town to take part in Quiet Prayer with a group of us. She had a vibrancy about her, and so naturally I asked her what made her such a happy person.
She said, “You know, Marie, it’s funny. When you get to be my age and you look back on the past, you see how much time you wasted being concerned about things that really didn’t matter at all. Here I am, seventy years old, and it really doesn’t matter that my son left the bathroom light on when he was a child, or that my husband didn’t take out the garbage, or that I spent too much money on my hair, or that grape juice was spilled on the carpet twenty-five years ago. I remember getting so upset over things that really were inconsequential in the total scheme of things. Now I know that what really matters is loving God with a pure heart and loving life and people with that same love.”
Her eyes sparkled as she went on. “It feels wonderful to be free now of all the stupid things I was so concerned with all my life. I’ve gotten wise, I guess. And I’ve learned that the wisest thing a person can do is to cherish where they are at in the moment. I’m wiser now, and I’m cherishing my life now exactly as it is.”
What makes her story so inspiring is that Nan had Stage 4 cancer.
The French author Colette exclaimed when she was eighty years old, “What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner!”1
The Austrian psychiatrist W. Beran Wolfe, born in 1900, gave us this wisdom: “If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a gold button that has rolled under the cupboard. . . . He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day.”2
Yet as we’ve learned, lasting happiness exists even in the face of suffering and difficulties.
Happiness in Spite of Suffering
Saint Faustina, the Polish nun who authored the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, said, “There are two things angels envy us humans for. One is the Eucharist [Communion] and the other is suffering.”3 This is an astounding statement and one that prompts us to honor our suffering instead of letting it terrify us. How many hospital rooms do I enter to pray for people where the walls are coated with panic, fear, and shame? “I shouldn’t be here.” “Why hasn’t God healed me?” “What’s going to happen to me?” “Is this my fault?” “I don’t want to die.” “Get me out of here.” “Where is God?” “Why is this happening to me?”
The apostle Paul taught us to suffer with dignity: “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day” (2 Tim. 1:12).
I’ve prayed for people whose panic exceeded their malady. Emotional pain screams for the Lord’s loving touch. When His peace that passes human comprehension enters the sickroom, it’s like spring blossoming forth from frozen panes of ice. I’ve remembered for a long time something said by William Faulkner: “If I were to choose between pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”4
What is important is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you. Worry, fear, and intense self-concern are self-destructive activities to your body, soul, and spirit. The longer you dwell on your misfortunes, the greater is their power over you. You’re not the illness or the problem. You’re God’s partner in managing it.
How much thought and effort you give to becoming a happy person is up to you. Can you name three ways you’ll make yourself happy every day?
Dr. Alfred Adler, who founded the School of Individual Psychology, claimed that it’s the person who’s not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injuries to others.
When are we the least interested in our fellow man? Answer: when we’re hurting. The big difference between being happy and being unhappy is that when we feel unhappy, we’re concerned mainly with ourselves, excluding all else. When we’re hurting, we feel nobody else could possibly suffer this badly, and if they are, so what.
When I’ve been broken apart inside, I’ve had to force myself to give to someone else, even if the tears were still stinging my cheeks. There’s a saying I cherish and tell myself often: “A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses.”
I believe we can all be rose givers in our unique ways. But it’s difficult to reach out to help another person when our own life is in the pits. I know. If you’re a victim of burnout or in the throes of falling apart, your thoughts are directed at yourself. Forget the world. When we’re depressed or anxious, we don’t think clearly at all.
The big struggle we face is between choosing God and choosing our own disastrous human nature. We fall apart and think we have a right to our miserable feelings; after all, just look at what happened to us. Disaster, disease, death, doubt, shame, fear—they will rail at us, but we are one of God’s greatest assets. We are His asset no matter what else we may have believed in our little warehouse of misbeliefs.
When I was going through a rough period in my life, I came to realize some harsh facts that actually made me feel better. I typed them out and saved them under “Words of Encouragement for the Weary Soul”:
In the course of your life:
You’re going to be misunderstood.
You’re going to be rejected.
You’re going to be betrayed.
You’re going to be underpaid, undervalued, and unappreciated.
You’re going to be abused, laughed at, put down, and ignored.
You’ll lose things, relationships, money, and time.
Get over yourself.
How often our efforts are misunderstood. How often we go unrecognized, unnoticed for heroic deeds. I’ll tell you what. It’s about time we shrug our shoulders, take a deep breath, and get over ourselves. (These may not be words you’d expect to hear from your therapist, but if I can follow my own advice, I’ll offer it to you too.)
I’ve been privileged to write several biographies of outstanding Christians, and one of the most life-changing, earth-shaking experiences for me was writing The Emancipation of Robert Sadler. At the time, I was a published poet, but I had never written a biography. I was very young and very conscientious. It took me a year to write the book. I traveled with Sadler (with my two children); I interviewed dozens of people; I photographed, recorded, researched, and wrote, working hard to get his story down with accuracy and clarity. This black man in his sixties was a former slave, sold by his father for beer money when he was only six years old to a plantation owner along with his two sisters. The remarkable thing about this great man of God was his overwhelming love for absolutely everyone. After living through unspeakable cruelty and shame, he had absolutely no bitterness or guile. He’s in heaven now, but people who knew him still rave about the love he radiated.
Sadler’s life was a living example of Nehemiah 8:10: “The joy of the LORD is your strength.” He had given his heart to the Lord in a prayer meeting as a slave, and in later years as a free man, he opened up a mission to help down-and-outers, ministering love and joy that transformed countless lives. His one and only requirement for happiness was maintaining an intimate relationship with the Lord.
Though as a child he never knew real love, Sadler didn’t let that keep him from the love of God. He never stopped to wonder if people liked him or not. He was far too consumed with giving love. He was happy. I can’t help long for more of us to be like him, so full of God that we exude happiness. He didn’t wait to be happy or look for reasons to be happy. He simply was happy, inside and out. He said to me one day, “Marie, we don’t need no qualifications to know the joy of the Lord except the Lord Himself.”
There Are No Prerequisites for Happiness
There are many restrictions we place on ourselves every day to keep us from going inside to find the happy lives we crave. We worry. We compete. We compare. We lie.
When will you qualify for happiness?
The causes of unhappiness are found in the three excessive As. (Note the word excessive.)
All three of these needs by themselves are healthy and realistic. The danger point is in excessiveness.
Examine your expectations and your demands that things go the way you want them to go. Pause and release your fears and concerns of the moment and think about some of the smallest things in your world as comforting and sweet. I’m reminded of some lines the poet gives us in Leaves of Grass where he writes about a leaf of grass as no less important than the journey of the stars or the narrowest hinge in his hand.5
When’s the last time you thanked God for the hinges of your hand? Can you celebrate a leaf of grass? Do you thank God for the stars’ journey across the galaxy? Try writing a poem of gratitude in your happiness journal today.
I believe the Lord is encouraging your heart at this moment and telling you you’re going to do just fine. He’s telling you you’re going to prosper, you’re going to reach your goals. I know this because that’s what His Word says. Think of yourself as favored. In the book of Leviticus, He explains His favor to His chosen ones (which includes you): “For I will look on you favorably and make you fruitful, multiply you and confirm My covenant with you” (26:9). His favor lasts. It doesn’t come and go depending on His mood. “His favor is for life” (Ps. 30:5).
Reality is that we live in an unhappy world. But I’m ringing the wake-up bell to snap you out of a quasi-religious panic so you can recognize it’s you who makes you unhappy and not the unhappy world you live in.
The apostle Paul tells us in the book of Romans that the sufferings of this present time aren’t worthy to be compared with the glory that awaits us (8:18). It’s the “flesh” that sneaks up on us. The Greek word translated as “flesh” is sarx, and Paul tells us to “make no provision for the sarx” (13:14).
Living in the sarx means making decisions and performing actions apart from faith and God’s indwelling Spirit. Sarx is displeasing to the Lord. It’s what’s in us that hasn’t been transformed by God. We aren’t to feed our self-centered human nature. We’re to feed our spirits with the power of the Holy Spirit in order to be conquerors of the defeating, negative grip of a hostile devil and a hostile, unhappy world.
Vera Wang, the famous fashion designer, spent her youth as a figure skater. She got up at four in the morning, skated before school, and after school went back to the rink and skated until eight o’clock at night. Three days a week she took ballet lessons for an hour and a half. Summers she went to skating camp, and by noon she already had skated seven hours. She competed for fifteen years and won many regional championships. She was among the top singles skaters in the United States for almost five years. She says daily discipline “was ingrained into me in a way that, at sixty, I still possess [it] and [it] will still be with me every single day of my life.” She goes on to say, “Were it not for what I learned through skating, I could never have reached my dream of becoming a designer. Those principles of discipline, desire, and hard work are one hundred percent responsible for my success.”6
Your success at living a fulfilled and gratified inner life depends on how much effort you put into your spiritual training. Happiness is a skill that with God’s grace you teach yourself. Your natural ability to be happy will only take you so far.
Just as a champion runner, skater, or gymnast practices daily, you too need to practice daily your happiness skills; you must practice the deep inner work that takes all your effort and your entire mind. For the rest of your life, you’re in training.
What Will You Do with Today?
Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, was adopted as an infant. He was teased that his parents didn’t want him. Nothing deterred his creativity as he grew up, and when he was in his early fifties, he said, “For the past thirty-three years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘no,’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”7
If this were the last day of your life, would you want to do what you’re about to do?
Do what you are afraid to do.
Give where you are afraid to give.
Ask what you are afraid to ask.
See what you are afraid to see.
Negativity may be around you, but it doesn’t have to be in you.
Let go of your pride, your love of doing things your way, and your love of worldly influences. Don’t wait until you’re old to see how beautiful you are.
You’re like a starfish, one of the most amazing of God’s creations. If a starfish loses one of its arms, it can actually regenerate and grow a new one. You’re made like that too. God is in the restoration business. You can regenerate the inner parts of yourself you’ve lost. There have been times in my life when I’ve lost joy. I’ve lost faith in men. I’ve lost a sense of self-worth. But my broken, frozen heart has been regenerated.
These words of the apostle Paul have yanked me out of the doubt and self-pity pits more than once: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Rom. 8:35, 37).
And then the kicker:
I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:38–39)
Forgive the world and its unfairness. Stop asking why bad things happen to good people. Here’s a list of twelve lasting happiness gifts to give to yourself. If you follow these twelve points, you’ll discover the freedom and happiness you deserve and long for. Copy them into your happiness journal.
As I write the last paragraph of this book, I sense more of a fantastic beginning than a conclusion. I’ll always be a pilgrim on the happiness journey, and in writing this book, I’ve shared moments in the lives of other pilgrims, and a part of me is in each of their stories. I relate to every person who pays the price to pull themselves out of the hungry jaws of an unhappy world and an unhappy self. I’ve written this book as evidence that it’s possible to be happy in an unhappy world and to know happiness in a lasting way. I pray you’ll increase your Quiet Prayer life and go forward as the treasure you are in a world that needs every bit of happiness you can bring it. You and I know the best things in life aren’t things. Happiness is everything. Please come back and visit these pages again and again.
Love,
Marie