Two Reasons We Have Trouble Discovering God’s Will For Our Lives
I have noticed ever since I’ve been paying attention to such things that most people are joyless. Sure, they are happy from time to time, and often diverted from their troubles through entertainment in one form or another. But that doesn’t mean that they are full of joy.
Joy and happiness are two different things. In fact, although most people don’t realize it, the two concepts are not even related in any way. Not at all. Apples and oranges.
Joy versus happiness
Happiness is situational. When we find ourselves in pleasant company, or in front of a captivating TV show, or looking at something beautiful, we feel happy. The moment that stimulus is removed, however, the happiness fades. The sad truth is that most of us spend our lives chasing smoke instead of building a fire.
Joy on the other hand, is not at all fleeting. It’s stable. It’s not an emotion, like happiness or displeasure; it runs a lot deeper than that. Joy comes from knowing who you are and Who made you. It’s the deep satisfaction that comes from believing that you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing. An abundance of joy leads to ample happiness, but it doesn’t work the other way around.
Meet the Giant brothers
One of my most strongly held convictions concerning the pursuit of true joy is that we must find our way over two obstacles on the path to becoming content with our lives. Let’s imagine that these obstacles are two giant brothers in our way. Their names are Liar and Hider. They can seem undefeatable while we are on the ground staring up at them.
In our analogy, let’s use a diamond to represent the discovery of your calling – the key to happily spending your life doing what you were created to do.
Liar’s job is to divert your attention by offering you all sorts of sparkly things. Some of these captivating objects are good, some benign, and some are pure evil, but none of them are the diamond. In fact, Liar doesn’t even know where the diamond is – but Hider does. He knows because he hid it, and he doesn’t want you to find it.
As you may have guessed, these giants work very well together, but we’ll have to defeat them one at a time, and in the right order. It will be hard to question Hider in just the right way about the location of the diamond while Liar is pestering you by offering you all of his distracting wares. Liar has to be stilled before we can get to work on his brother.
Peeking a little bit behind the curtain of this fairy tale, we see that Liar’s real job is to make you believe all sorts of things about yourself that are not true, and Hider’s job is to make sure you don’t discover the truth of God’s plan for your life.
Why were you created?
Have you ever wondered what you are here to do? You are not alone – not by a long shot.
Recently I created a survey and sent it out to 350 people. It contained only one question: “What problem are you facing in life that you would be most likely to read a self-help or motivational book about – especially if you REALLY thought it would help you solve your problem?” I set the survey up in a way that would make it impossible for me to know who the participant was. Many of the answers were so sad that I almost wish I could have known who the author was because I truly wanted to ease their pain or otherwise help them.
Seventy-four percent of the responses I received dealt directly with a dissatisfaction in life due to people having no idea what they are called to be. I categorized all the the results and I’ve summarized those categories into a few phrases which I have listed below. Do any of these sound familiar to you?
- I have no confidence in my future.
- I can’t move on from the past.
- I can’t find spiritual fulfillment.
- I have no direction.
- I have no social connectivity.
- I don’t know how to “be myself.”
- I don’t know how to be positive in a negative world.
- I have no ministry.
One of the replies bothered my deeply and made me catch my breath. I have no idea who this person is, but there’s a chance that I personally know him or her, because I sent my survey to people whom I actually have met, and some are real-life friends and family members. Here is what he or she said, verbatim: “Feeling like a failure. Like my life to this point has been a waste of time and I have not achieved anything that I thought as a child I would achieve. Feeling like I’ve lost my self respect, my self esteem and just feeling empty.”
(Here I’m going to flip a coin and pronounce this person a female, simply because I don’t want the awkwardness of typing “he or she” over and over again.)
If I’m guessing correctly, we’re not talking about someone who is so depressed that she is contemplating doing something rash, like hurting herself. She is probably not consumed moment by moment with the horrible emptiness she mentioned in her response to my survey question. Still, when asked to take a deep look at her life, this is her honest synopsis of her purpose in life. This is not a person who has joy. I’m sure she laughs at jokes, smiles at children, and pets puppies, but at the end of the day, her happiness is not being translated into real, meaningful existence.
Happiness does NOT lead to joy
We tend to believe that a string of unending happy events results in a joyful life, or perhaps more conservatively that there’s a great, big cosmic scale on which we put our life’s events, and if the happy ones outweigh the sad ones, we’re declared to be joyful. Those notions are just not true. In spite of our folk wisdom, happiness NEVER translates into joy.
So what are we to do?
We have to get past the giants.
Stay tuned for the next exciting installment: Making Liar Shut Up.
The Two Giants saga:
1. Two Reasons We Have Trouble Discovering God’s Will For Our Lives
2. Do You Define Yourself By Your Insecurities?
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