Looking for a plan. . .

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina you find it sad, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  It sounds reasonable.  Disorder is, well, disorderly.  Order results in predictable results.  That is the way we have defined it for many years.  This has resulted in the pursuit of happiness as if it were an outcome to pattern of behavior.  We look at those who claim to be happy, we try to find commonalities among those happy, and then turn it into a road map for those who are unhappy so that they, too, may find happiness.

In Christianity this has turned preaching into sermon series of dedicated steps to achieving the desired outcome.  We have ten step sermons and five step sermons designed to help us be happier, to fix our marriages, to fix our children, to fix our workplace, to fix our retirement, etc...

Tolstoy's tolstory had it wrong.  There is no uniformity of design for the happy and there is no diversity of the unhappy.  Happiness and unhappiness have no rhyme or reason about them.  I know people who are happy, that is, content, at peace, and comfortable with themselves and their lives, but whose lives are filled with upset, turmoil, and trouble.  I marvel that they are content.  I cannot understand how and why they are not destroyed and left broken by the terrible things life has handed them.  But they are not unhappy.  At the same time I know of people who have every advantage of things, family, talents, etc... but their hearts are in turmoil.  They refuse every offer of happiness life (and the Lord) offers them.  They foment upset everywhere they go, spreading the seeds of their discontent as if it were their divinely appointed vocation.

Tolstoy is wrong.  There is no one face or shape to happiness.  Except that to be happy has nothing to do with the things around you.  It is a choice.  Happiness is not the fruit of things going your way.  Happiness is the choice made by the person to be happy, that is, to be content and at peace.  If my experience is any help in this, it is the fruit of faith.  The happy people I know are people who live within the framework of peace and contentment with God and His promises.  Their joy is not a personal achievement but the Spirit engendered response to what God has done in Christ.  Their lives are lived out alleluias.  In the midst of every circumstance, they rest their hope upon the unchanging and steadfast love of God in Christ.  But their lives look very different from the outside.  You can discern no pattern to their happiness, no road map by which others may learn to be happy, and no correlation between earthly success, ease and comfort, or personal achievement.

No, Tolstoy is definitely wrong on this one.  Happiness does not look alike at all.  Even if I think it may come from a common source, not all Christians are happy.  So when you get to church on Sunday morning and you find the preacher has surveyed the evidence and is now giving you a dozen steps to happiness, get up and run.  Find one that preaches Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  There is more meat to help you find peace there than in any psychobabble pop therapy masquerading as Gospel preaching.  And don't forget that the lives of the happy look just as different as the lives of the unhappy.  Happiness is not an achievement.  It is a fruit born in the lives of those whom, I believe, know the God of peace whose love is shaped like a cross, and whose peace passeth understanding...