Happy or not, it’s a new year. We all hope and pray for happy, but we’re delusional if we believe that means a year with no challenges ahead. The truth is that a year without challenges is a year not lived. The world keeps spinning, societies continue to evolve and change and the beat goes on.
Life cannot stop just to make us “happy”, let alone the fact that what makes me happy may actually cause you to be unhappy. Like what if my football, baseball or whatever sports team wins and yours loses? I’m then happy with the outcome, whilst you are not. Perhaps you will get chosen for a promotion that I wanted or your candidate will win in 2012, but mine will lose. We cannot predict what the future holds, but we can expect that it will not only have victories, but also defeats. This is the way of life on this planet.
What we can hope for, however, is the ability to grow in our willingness to be happy about our life. If we take the attitude that we’ll be happy after our ship comes in, after our sore knee heals, after our spouse straightens out or our kids stop acting out, we’ll be waiting forever to be “truly happy.”
My experience says that nobody ever experiences true happiness until they learn how to be happy in their current circumstances. This, more often than not, requires us to make a willful decision to be happy. In fact, several years ago, a study was done of couples to find out why some seemed happy, while others did not. The results of the study revealed a somewhat surprising result. The difference between couples who were generally happy and those who were not came down to one thing. The couples, who identified themselves as happy, were happy because they had decided to be happy. It turns out that they all faced very similar and comparable circumstances and challenges, but the couples who faced those challenges with the positive attitude that they were going to be happy despite these challenges, did indeed feel happy. The other group was determined that if they could just get past their challenges, then they could be happy.
It’s funny. When we look around and see people being happy, we usually assume that their lives must be so blessed that they have few challenges. But it turns out that they are happy not because they are blessed with a lack of challenges, but because they are blessed with the ability to walk through those challenges without feeling like a victim of them; seeing them as part of a normal, happy life. Blessings and Shalom!

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