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The Pursuit of Joy Versus Happiness

8/16/2012

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Picture




This is my resentful face :(

My mother has had a stroke. Her left side has stopped working, and she is now in assisted living. However, she could regain complete use of her left arm and leg – if she would only put effort into her therapy.

I’m Doing My Bit – Why Doesn’t She Do Hers?

She is driving me mad. I made sure that she was no longer in real pain and found her a kind, strong (and handsome) male therapist who has the patience of a saint. And still she won’t try to get better.

It takes forever to visit her from my house in Maryland. I have to fly to Chicago, then take a three hour bus trip from O’Hare to reach her house, before climbing into her car and driving to the assisted living home.

All this for someone who isn’t trying to get better!

Resenting the Cross I’ve Been Given

For a long time I ranted at God for putting me in the position of having to take care of my mother’s finances, spend a week cleaning out her incredibly cluttered house, and trying - long-distance – to organize the redecorating and sale of her property. (Clearly she won’t live there again, and has agreed to my selling it.)

Mother is causing me incredible inconvenience. Doesn’t she care that I have a life of my own? Why won’t she put in the effort to literally get back on her feet?

Time to Reflect

The bus rides back and forth give me plenty of time to reflect, but also to read. The book on this latest trip was “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” by Susan Jeffers.

Was I reading that book because of Mother? No, actually. I’m trying to overcome certain fears I have when competing on my horse. But at the end of the book, Dr. Jeffers writes that life is about feeling joy, which is not derived from pursuing our own happiness.

“And what is joy? It is something that expresses the ebullience of the spiritual part of ourselves. Joy is characterized by lightness, humor, laughter and gaiety.”

She goes on to explain how we “become bigger (when) we move away from that ‘feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making me happy’ (George Bernard Shaw). We move into adult status, where we have much to give this world.”

How to Experience Joy

God creates so many opportunities for us to give to people, but we tend to carefully sidestep them, because they get in the way of our 'true goal' i.e. the pursuit of our individual happiness.

Our true goal should, however, be helping others. As Christians we’re supposed to serve.

We can’t all be Mother Theresa and do mighty deeds. And God doesn’t ask that of us. He simply wants us to be good and faithful servants, doing His work humbly, regardless of how insignificant it appears to us or others.

Once I grasped this, I realized how selfish I am to get mad because my mother is disrupting my life. She didn’t choose to have a stroke!

Instead I should be glad of the opportunity to take care of her needs, because God wants me to. He has given me a job, He has let me know that I matter to Him and to her.  My joy is in fulfilling God’s purpose for me.

Picture

Sleeping peacefully after a job well done!

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Gaudete, Then Gaudete Some More!

12/12/2011

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Yesterday was Gaudete Sunday and our priest exhorted us to rejoice. Was this a cruel joke?

But with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, Father began his sermon by asking how many of us feel joy right now at this stage of our preparations for Christmas. We looked at him with care-worn faces and hoped he understood why ‘joy’ wasn’t in our current vocabulary!

He did. He gets the fact that preparing for Christmas is enormously stressful.

Let Us Pray

But he also reminded us of St. Paul’s words in the second reading: “always give thanks to God and pray unceasingly.” Praying brings us closer to God, and we have so much to be thankful for.

He added that St. James tells us to quit complaining: no one wants to be around someone who moans all the time. One day Father wrote down every complaint he made that day, either in thought or in word. He was horrified to realize just how long his tally was. He needed to work hard at not complaining.

He pointed out how prone we are to grumbling about the one thing that’s not going right, and how we lose focus on everything that’s going well for us. We need to thank God for all the good in our lives, and offer up our difficulties to Him as a sacrifice.

Cheerful Equals Evangelical

Everyone likes a cheerful person, and people notice when a Christian, with all the reason in the world to be down in the dumps, is genuinely joyful about life. They want to know the secret of this joy. 

The ‘secret’ is that Christian’s faith.

Christmas is definitely a tough time of year for most of us. But with all those not-so-subtle ways that Christianity is being attacked, starting with being expected to say “Happy Holidays” in case we offend a non-Christian, it’s becoming more and more important to make public the wonderful benefits of believing in Christ.

Not only should we be spreading the Good News by greeting everyone with “Merry Christmas!” but we should behave as if we are having a Merry Christmas by being joyful. How else will non-believers come to know Christ?

Being cheerful involves preparing for the Lord’s birth with a smile despite the daily aggravations this brings. ‘Taint easy, and we won’t always be unsuccessful. But the important thing is that we get up and keep trying.

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    Hilary Walker

    A fanatic horse rider and writer of Christian Inspirational Fiction, who's beginning to understand that making it to Heaven is a tad more important than winning at horse shows.

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