a drop of water

No, I’m not talking about sadness :)

John Calvin, preaching to his congregation in Geneva, Switzerland, pointed out that we must develop better and deeper concepts of happiness than those held by the world, which makes a happy life to consist on “ease, honours, and great wealth”  Too much of the world’s happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another.  To increase my standard of living, people in another part of the world must lower theirs. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness.”

This was a sobering quote from Eugene Peterson’s, A Long Obedience In the Same Direction.  We like to quantify what will make us happy by what we can receive (what can I get out of life), completely ignoring the form of happiness found in what we can give.  Happiness has an inherent power to be passed on; truly happy people are empowered to do what it takes to make those around them happy as well.  Happinesses’ longevity is stifled when it stops at consumption before it is passed on.  The mark of a joyful person is their ability to bring joy into someone elses life.

Johannes Pederson words it like this: ”Life consists in the constant meeting of souls, which must share their contents with each other.  The blessed gives to the others, because the strength instinctively pours from him and up around him . . . . The characteristic of blessing is to multiply.”

Black Friday (Black Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc), when retailers pull the hood over as many people as they can, turning the once thankful-for-what-they-already-have-thanksgiving-celebrators into crazed-employee-trampling-door-busting-ready-to-buy-stuff-they-already-have-consumers in a span of 24hrs (or less), so that they [the retailers] can get a jump on holiday revenue, seems a little silly [stronger word needed here] as they try to inject people with the fleeting idea that buying more stuff that they already have, for only slightly reduced prices, will bring them happiness.  What if, instead, we had a Free Friday where the massive institution of retailers tried to make a difference by giving to the people who couldn’t normally afford to be their customers?

Maybe not the “happiest” business model from a bottom line point of view, but maybe thats the point.  That the success, the happiness, etc of a business can not just be limited to an inward bottom line focus just like our own individual happiness can not be fully realized by an inward focus on what happens to us as individuals. The missing aspect of our happiness is the relational giving and passing on act that is rooted in the thanksgiving that we have in God’s provision.  So today, my challenge is, not just to be thankful for what I have, but to see if I can give a bit of that happiness to someone else.