Musings on happiness...

Last night, I was sitting in our little living room with my darling, just sharing the day, and I started really thinking about all the recent changes we've experienced and how they felt to me. I guess I just started to take inventory of our life right now, and it all looks amazingly good. I started a new job on Tuesday, and it looks like our little class of older 2's is really going to go well. I can already sense the various personalities of the children, and I'm looking forward to getting to know and love all these children. I'm also going to be teaching a small, hands-on science enrichment class for 3-5 year olds, one hour a week for several weeks, and I'm enjoying looking for great experiments for us all to do together. David's work hasn't picked up so much yet that it's become difficult for us, and that has lasted far longer than I ever dreamed it would. He has lots of fascinating experiences and interesting conversations to tell me about when he comes home, and he involves me in the Supreme Court world. This is a once-in-a-lifetime, amazing opportunity that we're both just drinking in. He loves his job, and I love to see him loving it. We have a wonderful, healthy church filled with plenty of others our age and stage of life that we can serve and be served by. (Considering our last years of church and stage of life difficulty, that is a really neat sentence for me to write.) We're getting to know some of them better, and we have a chance to be involved in a great small group. I'm excited about the potential for neat friendships of all kinds around here. There are so many old friends that we've reconnected with, and so many new friends to become involved with that I'm overwhelmed. We give dinner invitations, and we receive them back. I don't feel the loneliness I did in infertility, surrounded by happy families. The friend part of life just isn't as difficult now as it has been the past few years. The crowning joy of the inventory is the miracle I feel all the time in my tummy. He's kicking me a good bit now, and I love to feel him telling me he's there and happy and growing up healthy. So I was sitting in the living room, thinking about all these things, and this profound feeling of happiness and gratitude to God came over me. We're settling in, and wow! Things actually look good! I think that I've been wary and watchful since we've moved, really for the past couple of years. What have I been watching for? The other shoe to drop. Disaster to fall from the clouds once again. Waves to capsize our ship once again while we desperately bail out the boat. I've been afraid to hope that it'll all be ok. Let's face it. I've been afraid to accept that God might have blessings for us that I like right now. I've been afraid to say that being happy is really ok. I know I've written about this before, and this is old territory for this blog. But it's something I struggle with emphasizing because I'm learning all the time lately the major impact that this way of viewing things has had on my life. For the past couple of years, I saw "happy" as a feeling that was pretty illusive. I would have various moments of happy, but I didn't expect them. I was hunting for joy. Joy, as we learn from Biblical studies of the concept, is something that God gives even when happiness is illusive. It doesn't rely on circumstances like happiness does, so it's something the Christian can get when happiness seems pretty far away. Joy wasn't working so much for me at the time either =), but I had it in my head that it was easier than happy, so I started saying things to myself like this: "Happiness in life shouldn't be my goal. It's not the point of the Christian life. Serving God in the circumstances that He's given me is my goal. Gotta kill the idea that happiness is what I'm seeking. Happiness- bad, self-sacrifice, serving, enduring-good. I'm pressing on, pilgrim (insert gritted teeth)." This kept me from feeling so guilty that I wasn't happier in the circumstances that God had assigned to me. I knew I should find more pleasure in the life that He wanted for me, but frankly, I wasn't doing well at that many days, so surviving and serving with bits of pleasure in there seemed like the best I could do. That takes us up to now. What do I do now when things really are going amazingly well? How should I feel? My default mode, built on this past baggage, has been to feel guilty for being happy since I wasn't so much when things weren't going my way. I've been cutting off the happy feeling at the knees, feeling that it wasn't appropriate for a person who wasn't particularly thrilled when things were bad to take pleasure in them once they were good. Yes, I should've been happier with God and life and all the blessings that I did have in darker days. I should've been more joyful in all things. But I wasn't, and I'm going to stop living in the guilt of that. I am clay, and He knows it. For most of us, it's a lot easier to be grateful to God when we're being blessed with flowers and candy than when we're being blessed with a heaping plateful of spiritual brussel sprouts. We don't talk about it; we know we're not supposed to see things this way, but guess what, our actions often show that we do. If we make any progress at all in appreciating our nasty vegetables, I'm going to call it a victory for weak humans. And since I made a little bit of progress and managed to swallow some of the little buggers, I'm going to stop feeling guilty, and I'm going to enjoy this time in my life, and all these particular blessings I've begged God for as long as they last. I'm really happy. There, I said it. I'm flooded with gratefulness at the mountains of blessings that I'm experiencing right now. I count them all, and there is so much that God has given us. I am grateful at the good things He's given, and the requests that He's graciously granted. My cup really overflows, and I don't know what to do with all the bounty. So I'm going to be happy. Ha! =)