This evening, as I began writing my editorial, a white Shih Tzu with patches of sandy fur stood on his hind legs, set his paws on my recliner and stared up at me. Unable to resist, I picked him up and set him next to me in the chair. He has now nestled his small, warm body against my leg and has drifted off to sleep. He’s an affectionate little puppy, the runt of a litter, and his name is Bear.
Now, Bear isn’t our dog. We’re actually dog-sitting for family members, as we do every chance we get. My wife and I, along with our children, love every moment we have with Bear. He enjoys playing with us and snuggling next to us, and he makes us happy.
If only happiness were like this puppy.
A dog named Bear
Unfortunately, for dog lovers like myself, happiness tends to have some feline qualities.
“Happiness is like a cat,” author William J. Bennett writes. “If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you’ll find it rubbing up against your legs and jumping into your lap.”
Bennett cleverly pinpoints a paradox of happiness – namely, that we only find happiness when our minds are on something else altogether. Thinkers of the past have puzzled over this paradox for ages, but their interest in happiness ran deeper than this. They asked what happiness was and how we could find it – and their answers often pointed toward God.
“Happiness is roughly synonymous with the biblical idea of ‘blessedness,’” theologian Ken Myers writes. “In classical and medieval Christian ethics happiness referred to a state of human flourishing or well-being that aligned the life of a person with the truest good. Actions, thoughts, desires, and ambitions had to be ordered in light of the proper end of mankind for a person to be truly happy. … In Christian terms, the pursuit of happiness meant recognizing that God had created us to flourish in the context of obedience to Him so that our image-bearing nature might display His glory.”
Needless to say, our present culture too often squanders this received wisdom about the true nature of happiness. Drunk on the individualistic hedonism of the sexual revolution, many people in our culture are pursuing happiness in sinful ways. Ironically, this guarantees that they won’t find true happiness.
So we’ve stumbled onto a second paradox of happiness, discussed centuries ago by early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo.
“Man indeed desires happiness, even when he lives so as to make happiness impossible,” Augustine writes. “What could be more of a lie than a desire like that? This is the reason why every sin can be called a lie. For, when we choose to sin, what we want is to get some good or get rid of something bad. The lie is in this, that what is done [namely, sin] for our good ends in something bad, or what is done [namely, sin] to make things better ends by making them worse. Why this paradox, except that the happiness of man can come not from himself but only from God, and that to live according to oneself is to sin, and to sin is to lose God?”
Meanwhile, even Christians sometimes neglect the true source of happiness. We hold too tightly to the blessings of this life, forgetting they will someday fade away and forgetting they are gifts from our heavenly Father, who alone can make us truly and eternally happy. Let us hold them, instead, with open hands and praise God as the giver of every “good and perfect gift” (James 1:17).
Fortunately, against such a backdrop, believers today have the privilege of sharing a message that can bring true and lasting happiness to people caught up in fleeting and sinful pleasures. As the 16th-century English Bible translator William Tyndale once wrote, the gospel we proclaim is truly good news – in his words, “merry, glad and joyful tidings.” The gospel, he says, “makes a man’s heart glad and makes him sing, dance and leap for joy.”
As for ourselves, we’re privileged each day to find true happiness in loving God and praising Him for the blessings, big and small, that He pours out on us. Blessings, in my case this evening, like a small dog named Bear.