Happiness
John Gipson

The following article on happiness speaks helpfully and appropriately to the people of our society. The life focused outward is the one that discovers the "joy unspeakable and full of glory."

A song which shot to the top of the charts a couple of years back advised us to forget our troubles and just be happy. To some people happiness is play, taking a vacation, forgetting all of our responsibilities, doing what we want to do. An ancient philosopher, Aristotle, had much to say about happiness. But he insisted that man is cut out not so much for happiness as for action, for work, as we would say.

A modern voice has said, "Looking back on the happiness I have had in life - and I have had my fair share of it, and many kinds of it - I think I can say that the best of it has come from the work I have had to do, and from the people who have helped me in doing it" Someone has observed that there are two main kinds of happiness: the first is the kind that is given to us by other people, and the second is the kind we create for ourselves.

A person who is happy only when other people make him so is really a very miserable soil of person, and there are a lot of them about - people who expect to be made happy by the State, or by the Government, or by the social system or by the church, or by their friends and neighbours in general, and who go about complaining and whining because other people are not making them as happy as they think they have the right to be. I tend to believe that nobody can be very happy in this world unless he makes the greater part of his happiness for himself. But how does one go about it?

Let me suggest a few Bible verses: Psalm 1, Matthew 5:1-12, James 5:11

BE HAPPY!!!