Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “If,” asks a young man whether he can “meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” Happiness and unhappiness are like that. They could be thought of as synonyms for “Triumph” and “Disaster,” and like these twin imposters, they also deserve to be treated just the same.
In The Time Paradox, a book about psychology, authors Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd quote an authority on happiness as saying, “Happiness is not a static state that we attain. It is an elusive goal that we must constantly pursue.” The two authors leave the matter there, resigned to this constant pursuit—not questioning whether there may well be a beneficial static state that we can attain. There is such a state, and the word for this state is joy.
Joy is different from happiness. Turning toward joy can actually compromise happiness for a time. “Happiness” consists of all of the external sensations of satisfaction, excitement, pleasure, and relief that we obtain during our wending course through the material world. “Joy,” by contrast, is a fruit of the Spirit of God—one of the fruits listed in Galatians 5:22-23. That means joy is as constant as God is. While happiness is fleeting and recedes from our hand, it is we who move away from joy.
Joy is found on the mountaintops. That is, the figurative mountaintops—the heights of our surrender to God. Because we are human, we generally end up leaving these mountaintops and descending to the valleys again, the valleys where our doubts and anxieties swarm over us to obscure the light.
The way to have more joy is to trust. In the narrows of the valley, our temptation is to act as though the valley is all there is. We build a bunker in the valley and we continually forage around it for all of the scraps of happiness we can find to comfort us. Guarding this camp and gathering enough happiness to sustain some kind of fragile contentment can quickly grow to occupy all of our time and attention—all that we are. The alternative, to trust in joy, is to live the way we glimpsed within our hearts to live back when we had that experience on the mountaintop—that time when we were lit up with the Spirit and our joy was nearly complete.
We trust that this joy was true because we know that the Spirit is true. To trust this way means leaving the bunker behind. Doing this is scary, but eventually you pass through the valley to reach the mountain again.
Joyce Meyer has a wonderful way of expressing this. Her book Approval Addiction is about the fear of not pleasing other people, and how to get free of this fear. In the book, she offers this simple three-word motto: Do it afraid!
The fear is no reason not to proceed. All of us feel afraid—we can’t help that feeling. But we need not live as if the fear has authority and has to be obeyed. Keep going, even if only slowly and clumsily at first. Obey God rather than fear by following the call of joy—even if you have to carry fear with you like a burden as you go.
The fear is an imposter, too. It’s a coward—it will burn away.
Evaporating as readily as a mist, the fear dissolves in the sunlight you find when you get clear of the cover of the valley, to begin ascending toward the mountaintop once more.
Related post: A To-Do List for the Sanctified
