on happiness

* from John Eldredge's Walking With God *

"'God wants us to be happy,' I said. 'But he knows that we cannot be truly happy until we are completely his and until he is our all. And the weaning process is hard.' Even though I was playing the role of counselor in that moment, I was feeling that God had arranged the whole encounter for me. 

'The sorrows of our lives are in great part his weaning process. We give our hearts over to so many things other than God. We look to so many other things for life. I know I do. Especially the very gifts that he himself gives to us - they become more important to us than he is. That's not the way it is supposed to be. As long as our happiness is tied to the things we can lose, we are vulnerable.'...

We really believe that God's primary reason for being is to provide us with happiness, to give us a good life. It doesn't occur to us that our thinking is backward. It doesn't even occur to us that God is meant to be our all, and that until he is our all, we are subhuman. The first and greatest command is to love God with our whole being. Yet it is rare to find someone who is completely given over to God. And so normal to be surrounded by people who are trying to make life work. We think of the few who are abandoned to God as being sort of odd. The rest of the world - the ones trying to make life work - seem perfectly normal to us...

I am just stunned by this propensity I see in myself - and in everyone I know - this stubborn inclination to view the world in one and only one way: as the chance to live a happy little life...

[There] is so much in the life that God gives us. As Paul said, God has richly provided us with everything for our enjoyment (1 Timothy 6:17). In Ecclesiastes, Solomon wrote that to enjoy our work and our food each day is a gift from God (2:24). We are created to enjoy life. But we end up worshiping the gift instead of the Giver. We seek for life and look to God as our assistant in the endeavor. We are far more upset when things go wrong than we ever are when we aren't close to God. And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that we release our grasping of life here and now. Usually through pain. God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to him. He thwarts us in our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don't really look to God for life. Our first reaction is usually to get angry with him, which only serves to make the point. Don't you hear people say, 'Why did God let this happen?' far more than you hear them say, 'Why aren't I more fully given over to God?'

We see God as a means to an end rather than the end itself. God as the assistant to our life versus God as our life. We don't see the process of our life as coming to the place where we are fully his and he is our all. And so we are surprised by the course of events. 

It's not that God doesn't want us to be happy. He does. It's just that he knows that until we are holy, we cannot really be happy. Until God has become our all, and we are fully his, we will continue to make idols of the good things he gives us."