#9. Our Appetite for Happiness is Meant to be Big
Some readers might be in a hurry for me to get to the, “just tell me what to do with my screaming toddler” bit, but to love the child in a tantrum, we need a clear sense of our responsibilities. Behind knowing our responsibilities is a tussle in our desires. There’s little use in knowing our responsibilities if we don’t want to do them. Sometimes, we want something else more. Why? Because we think happiness is surer elsewhere.
In the last article, I wrote about how we’re embarrassed about goodness. Some of us are equally clumsy about happiness. They do go together after all.
I’ve mentioned that we run aground when we pursue happiness as an end in itself; when we set aside goodness because we think the cost is intolerable. Another problem happens when we tell ourselves that happiness doesn’t matter at all. This is where Christian women who love the Bible are more likely to end up. To get through the duties before us, we persuade ourselves that happiness is a base motivation which doesn’t drive us. Perhaps we think we have grown out of it. But our desire to be happy is in every cell of our body. We ache when happiness is absent. God made us to be that way.
When we pretend away our desire to be happy, we deny something of our personhood and we ignore a big part of God’s character. Our emotional signals are a gift pointing us to himself. Our fault is not in wanting joy. A parched person can’t talk herself out of thirst. Our problem comes when we putrefy God’s water then try to drink it. Or when we think we don’t need the water. Our drive for happiness doesn’t go away when we grit our teeth and ignore it. We were made to be supremely happy with God. That appetite was created into us with the image of God. We can’t remove it any more than we can live without water. To try is to contort, distort and disorder ourselves.
In the perfect beginning, sinless humanity was completely happy with God. In the New Creation, redeemed humanity will be supremely happy, when God dwells face to face with his people again. In the between times, we still have that capacity to hold enormous happiness, but we’re dehydrated. We’re groaning in frustration and decay. That strain points us outside of ourselves. All because we don’t deserve to be happy doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want it.
Our vast capacity for happiness is part of being made in God’s image. We’re made in the image of the infinite God who is the origin and destination of all happiness. When our vast appetite is not oriented to him, we are vastly miserable.
Even when we think we’re not motivated by a longing for happiness, something deep in us is still pursuing it. We still do what we can to secure happiness even while we’re telling ourselves that it doesn’t matter. We deny our pursuit of happiness and we end up splintered, disintegrated, compromised, ashamed. In this doubleminded, self-deluded state, we don’t do well as mothers and we certainly don’t enjoy it. We become susceptible to false therapy when our unbearable days come. The kind of therapy which takes us inside ourselves and can be summed up in a meme. The kind of comfort which is bought at the price of what is good.
We forget that God cares more about our happiness than we do. He is bringing his children into his own transcendent happiness. This satisfaction is long and hard won. It is not unprecedented that God withholds lesser pleasures so that he can give greater ones. He causes hunger so that he can singlehandedly provide the food (like manna in the wilderness, Deut 8). To know his greater comfort is the purpose of our sorrows (2 Corinthians 1). There is no consolation where there has not first been loss. God’s best happiness comes to us down difficult roads. Dodge the difficulties and we miss the comfort. There is no other path which arrives at the fullness of joy and pleasure forevermore by God’s side. God authors a long, meandering story which plumbs great depths (even the death of his own Son), while it moves towards the great resolution. We’re not at the end of that story yet, though the conclusion has already been secured. The longing is massive because the joy is. The Beatitudes remind us that the person who hungers and thirsts after God’s righteousness will be filled, the person who sorrows because of their spiritual poverty is blessed, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. In Christ, the less comfortable feelings are the necessary prelude to joy.
When we pray to our Father to do his will on earth as it’s done in heaven, we are asking for earth to conform to all that God says is good. This will not be a bland, neutral, boring end. Heavenly good is where all happiness comes from. God is the King of rejoicing, singing and delights. His presence is the happiest place in the cosmos. When everything on earth is done as it is in heaven, there will be no shadowy corner left unhappy. Whether we know it or not, this is what we’re all longing for. Our longing is meant to be big.
Working out what is good and how to rejoice isn’t neat and tidy (that’s what Light Duties is about—a year of laying the foundation so we can get better at both). We live in the age of blessed complications while we wait for Jesus to bring undiluted, untainted, unending blessing in the new heavens and the new earth. These complications don’t mean that goodness and happiness aren’t real. And the ultimate-ness of the future goodness and happiness does not mean that now doesn’t matter. (more below the photo)
A common Christian line of thought says, because Jesus matters more than everything, nothing else matters: I don’t matter, the things I do in my waking hours don’t matter, happiness doesn’t matter. Whereas the Bible shows us that because Jesus is Lord of everything, because he has purchased a kingdom where everything will conform in every way to heavenly goodness, everything matters. (My old friends at Trinity Church Tamworth taught me that well). Everything is from Jesus and through him and for him. Everything in the cosmos has its place in Jesus and under his Lordship. Crumbs, dust, odd socks, picture books, mud kitchens, tree swings, dirt under fingernails. Even happiness. Jesus makes our longings for happiness greater, not smaller. Jesus makes everything greater, not smaller. He is more than a match for it all.
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses
