Whither happiness?

The lottery winner screams with happiness. She is almost delirious. She has beaten the odds. However, at the winning moment she isn’t thinking about how family, neighbors, and others will suddenly jockey with each other to become her new best friends. Former lottery winners have found that their lives have indeed changed as a result, not always in the direction of carefree bliss they had expected.

The tendency is to assume that happiness comes from “things,” from getting what we want.

The advice to “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it,” understands that happiness is not necessarily getting what we think we want. Getting what we think we want sometimes leads elsewhere.

True contentment, at least in my experience, comes from a quiet joy in our relationship to our Father-Mother God. If that Being is good, present, caring, and wholly Spirit, He/She is active and has no limitations. And that’s a rather interesting parentage.

Take Joseph, youngest son of Jacob, whose brothers were so jealous of him, they nearly killed him, but decided to turn a profit, and sold him into slavery instead. What gladness could possibly lie ahead? Suddenly there was no one who loved or cared about him, no parents to guide and protect him.

But wait. Is there a Father-Mother God guiding him, if Joseph just asks for that guiding?

The Bible story doesn’t specifically tell us Joseph was happy, but it shows him in a productive life of service in Egypt. First he served in Potiphar’s household in a position of trust and authority. Later he served Pharaoh in a position of even greater authority, saving Egypt and its neighbors from mass starvation.

Helping those less fortunate

The clue is “service.” When I worked in a nursing facility years ago, I discovered it was fun to be on duty on the holidays – Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, etc. It was totally satisfying to bring special joy and cheer to clients on these days when often they did not have family coming to see them.

Happiness isn’t selfish. Happiness is spiritual and it’s found in service. Selfishness may deceive us for awhile, but eventually we discover that self-serving is out of sync with the laws of the universe.

Some say we are hard-wired to be happy when we are able to contribute to making others happy, to feel that our lives are somehow making the world a better place.

It does seem to be human nature, hard-wired or otherwise, to discover meaning and purpose through unselfish caring.