Settling for happiness

Sometimes in our search for happiness, we end up settling for happiness.

“God wants me to be happy!”

“Do whatever makes you happy!”

“As long as it makes you happy.”

Our culture has made happiness the goal, and yet so many of the things that we experience in the pursuit of happiness can’t make us happy 100% of the time.

We search for meaningful relationships, and yet that introduces us to disappointment as we learn to love one another, and pain when that relationship ends, whether it ends poorly in a breakup or ends in death after decades of being together.

I could go on, but you get the point. If our happiness is the goal, we’ll never stay with anything or anyone through the difficult seasons that don’t make us happy, and we run the risk of missing something that runs much deeper than happiness. You and I will never find joy if all we want is happiness.

There is a passage of Scripture in a little-known book by a prophet who was called by God to live a life that nobody would call happy. You can read more about Hosea on your own time (and I would highly recommend it), but for now, take note of what I’ve highlighted in these two verses:

Therefore, I am going to persuade her, lead her to the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her vineyards back to her and make the Valley of Achor into a gateway of hope. There she will respond as she did in the days of her youth, as in the day she came out of the land of Egypt. (Hosea‬ ‭2:14-15‬ ‭CSB, emphasis mine)

In our search for happiness, we focus on the great promises in these verses: God will give us hope, make us fruitful, give us the passion and energy we had when we were younger and were first set free from sin.

Of course, all of those things would make us happy, and they should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But take a minute to ponder more than the “what” in these verses. Did you notice where God gives her all the things that could make her happy? In the wilderness.

God led her to the desert, and in that place, she found far more than happiness. She found joy.

Joy comes in the morning (Psalm 30:5) and replaces mourning (Isaiah 61:3).

Joy grows in the places that the search for happiness will never take us, and is the reward for those who refuse to settle for happiness.

Are you in the desert? Instead of rushing to get out of it, sit with the Lord and allow Him to transform it.

Beauty for ashes. Praise for despair. Gladness instead of mourning.

Joy instead of happiness.

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