Roberta Grimes

God and Happiness

Posted by Roberta Grimes • August 31, 2024 • 14 Comments
Jesus, The Source

Who can I turn to when nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know, and so I must go where destiny leads me.
With no star to guide me, and no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way and, after the day, the darkness will hide me.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you, I could learn to. With you, what a new day!
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) & Anthony Newley (1931-1999) from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

When my much-beloved Thomas told me that “God and Happiness” was to be our topic for this week, I told him he had to be kidding me. Long ago I became convinced that happiness is mostly genetic: you either are blessed with the happiness gene, or else – too bad – you simply don’t have it. And my mother had a double dose of it. Whatever was going on in her life, she immediately made the best of it, she rearranged matters to better suit herself and those she loved, and she never looked back or had a moment’s regret. I cannot recall her face without a smile on it, nor a moment when she ever cried in her life except when her own mother died. And speaking of her parents, they were poor Danish immigrants to America at the turn of the twentieth century, who, also true to their wonderful genes, were always happy and always in love with one another, no matter what might be going on in their lives.

Come to think of it, Denmark generally is ranked to be the second happiest country on earth, while Finland – which is another Scandinavian country – is routinely ranked as the happiest. So the fact that my genetic ancestry is Danish would suggest that of course I would find being always happy to be especially easy. You cannot read these articles about the happiest countries year after year without suspecting that raw genetics must have at least some considerable part to play in human happiness. I recall my poor Danish immigrant grandfather, who never in his life that I could see had very much to be happy about, and yet I cannot recall ever seeing him without a merry grin as he went about his days. Now, there was a genuine Dane for you!

And I cannot recall even one day in my life before I entered college and met a few moody teenagers when I even knew how being unhappy might feel. My childhood and youthful states of mind ranged from being mildly delighted to unexpected outright bursts of joy. And really, to be frank, for no reason at all: just because of the way the light was falling, the sound of the wind, or the sight of a bird outside my window. I have always been happy. Happiness is not a virtue, after all, but rather it is an extraordinary gift.  And as I have progressed through life and married, reared children, studied the afterlife and also studied the Gospels; and then, OMG, as I have met my beloved Thomas and then actually even met Jesus in person, my life has only grown happier still. I have always been the happiest person I knew, and always by what seemed to be utter happenstance.

So I think of myself as the last person in the world who should be giving anyone advice about how to be happy! I have no idea why, but like my mother and grandfather, I am always fundamentally delighted with life, and for no particular reason. Anyway, we have blogged on the topic of Happiness twice already in just this calendar year: once in May, when I think we discussed the subject pretty definitively; and before that in January, when Thomas was worked up about the morning when he and I first met two thousand years ago, and then we died together during a Roman massacre of Jesus’s earliest followers. I thought the subject of Happiness had by now been largely done to death in this space!

“So, okay,” I told my Thomas on Friday morning. “We’ve already done Happiness, so we now have nothing to write about.” He said sharply, “Read the title again. Your topic here is ‘God and Happiness’. And by the way,” he added, sounding cranky, “I do not believe for one moment that there is such a thing as a ‘happiness gene’, so come up with a better explanation than that.” Well, okay then!

Since Thomas wouldn’t let me off the hook with a new last-minute topic, and since he didn’t feel like helping me with this one, I asked God to please give me someplace to start. And God first sent me to Psalm 46. which was written and sung more than seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus. It reminds us that:

God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in times of trouble.
² Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change
And though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea;
³ Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.

⁴ There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy dwelling places of the Most High.
⁵ God is in the midst of her, she will not be moved;
God will help her when morning dawns.
⁶ The nations made an uproar, the kingdoms tottered;
He raised His voice, the earth melted.
⁷ The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold.

⁸ Come, behold the works of the Lord,
Who has wrought desolations in the earth.
⁹ He makes wars to cease to the end of the earth;
He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;
He burns the chariots with fire.
¹⁰ “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
¹¹ The Lord of hosts is with us;
The God of Jacob is our stronghold. (Psalm 46:1-11)

Such a beautiful Psalm! “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.” So stop fretting, My beloved little child, and stop all your worrying, for you have a Divine Eternal Father in Me; and your Father loves you, and your Father owns every power. This is the first and foremost, and indeed it is the ultimate and only reason for us ever to be happy.

I recall that when I first encountered unhappy young people in college, their entirely new mindset mystified me. I had never before seen or even imagined unhappiness. I didn’t realize until much later in life the fact that none of these depressed young folks had a relationship with God, when my own divine relationship was something that I had taken entirely for granted ever since I had my first experience of light at the age of eight. Even now, I can only try to imagine what it must have felt like to be young and not to know God, not to be certain that God is real and loves me perfectly, and therefore what it must have felt like not to be certain that my own life is forever. And, oh my god, I would have found my young life to be unbearable then, and full of cares, just as they seemed to be finding early-adult life to be for them! I feel so sorry for them now, in retrospect, and sorry that I didn’t understand them at all, and that I didn’t try to help them a great deal more than I did at the time.

Of course, our dear Jesus never had much patience for people who were not really listening to Him closely, and who were not trying to learn from Him, since they were still so completely immersed in this world’s cares. Woe betide you if you were in His crowd of followers, and you made of our Jesus an ignorant and selfish matter-based request like the one that follows:

¹³ Someone in the crowd called to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” ¹⁴ But Jesus said to him, “You there, who appointed Me a judge or arbitrator over you?” ¹⁵ Then He said to them, “Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.” ¹⁶ And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man was very productive. ¹⁷ And he began reasoning to himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?’ ¹⁸ Then he said, ‘This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹ And I will say to myself, “You have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.”’ ²⁰ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?’ ²¹ So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (LK 12:13-21). And wow, you and I are on the edge of our seats now, aren’t we, and thinking, Tell us, Jesus! Please tell us, dear Wayshower, how we, too, can become rich toward God?

So then Jesus does indeed proceed to tell us how we can become rich toward God, using some of the most beautiful language in the whole Christian Bible. ²² And He said to His disciples, “For this reason I say to you, do not worry about your life, as to what you will eat; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. ²³ For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. ²⁴ Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap; they have no storeroom nor barn, and yet God feeds them. How much more valuable you are than the birds! ²⁵ And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life’s span? ²⁶ If then you cannot do even a very little thing, why do you worry about other matters? ²⁷ Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these! ²⁸ But if God so clothes the grass in the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you? You men of little faith! ²⁹ And do not seek what you will eat and what you will drink, and do not keep worrying! ³⁰ For all these things the nations of the world eagerly seek; but your Father knows that you need these things. ³¹ But seek His kingdom, and these things will be added to you. ³² Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom! (LK 12:22-32)

There it is, and it is so simple! Jesus’s prescription for happiness is this: stop worrying and never be afraid, because God assures us of God’s eternal love and protection. God really does have this perfect level of happiness in store for each of us here on earth, for He tells us that even right at this moment, the kingdom of God is within each of us! (LK 17:21) And this is true both now and forevermore. This, my very dear ones, is the entire difference between being always happy in both this world and the next, and never being really happy at all, no matter what you might have and no matter what you might do. How can you ever be truly happy in this world, when at any moment you might blink out like a light? Or, worse, when at any moment you might be dropped, forever aware, into a void of nothing for eternity? As I think about it now, for those that I met in college who were truly unhappy, it was their existential terrors that were upsetting them most. Children seldom think about dying. It is only in our teens, perhaps, that these awful existential terrors start to seize us.  

So if you ever want to be truly happy in your life, then it is up to you to set yourself up with God for daily and eternal happiness! And this, my beloveds, is how you can do it:

• Claim and own the fact that human life is eternal. If you don’t yet know that for certain, then just spend a year on seekreality.com, absorbing as much afterlife evidence as you can, until there is not a shred of doubt left in your mind. Until you are certain of the fact that it really is impossible for you ever to die, there always will be that remaining pall of existential sadness over your life.
• Claim and own the eternal certainty of God’s love. There are a number of ways that you can do this, but perhaps the most certain way is to study Jesus’s teachings on teachingsbyjesus.com, and in Liberating Jesus and The Fun of Loving Jesus as well. Learn The Lord’s Prayer and the 23^rd Psalm, and say them frequently to God as love-talk between you, while always really meaning their words. God is your personal doting Father and eternally listening. Jesus is your Wayshower and Best Friend, and God is the Father of us all.
  

God and Jesus are there with and within you, even now. They cannot possibly be closer to you than They already are. But they are respectful of your privacy. So they are waiting for you to say the first Hello.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With You, I could learn to. With You, what a new day!
But who can I turn to, if You turn away?
– Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) & Anthony Newley (1931-1999) from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)