Thoughts on a Sunday

Hi guys…checking in on a relaxing Sunday at home.  Few things to do here and there, but mostly, the day has been spent relaxing, catching up on some ministry business, and watching a couple of movies.

I just started watching Julie and Julia.  Have ya’ll seen this?  Such a great movie.

The movie is based on the lives of two different people (true stories, btw), Julia Child and Julie Powell.  Julie Powell is a blogger who decides to cook every recipe in the Julia Child french cooking cookbook (over 500 recipes) in a year’s time, and creates a blog about it.  Julia Child, of course, is a famous cook, but this is the story of how she became ‘famous,’ while married and living in France.

As I watched the movie, the thing that struck me most of all was happiness.  Julia Child was *so* happy.  You know those people, that are just happy people all the time, and you wonder, “How?”  How can it be that someone is *always* that happy?  Julia Child illuminated that happiness. 

I struggle with that, but yet, as I was watching the movie, that was my heart’s desire.  I want to be the person who finds happiness in all things and people.  I want to be someone that anyone can call and that person will know they’ll get a word of encouragement or laughter from me.  I want to be the person who can walk into a room and get the moodiest of moody people to just crack a smile.

    

I think that happiness comes, obviously from Christ.  The YouCat tells us “God has placed in our hearts such an infinite desire for happiness that nothing can satisfy it but God himself.”  (281)   I think that in my prayers for a good life, a happy life, a content, safe, and blessed life, I need to pray for that courage to be happy.  For the ability to bind the negative, the ugly, or just the bad parts of this world, and to only be able to see the good things.  It’s a matter of perception, really.  I mean, do I choose to be happy? 

In my house, I have this sign hanging up in my kitchen.  I see it everyday.  I want to live out that feeling to everyone around me, all the time.  The thing that I think about most is that it’s almost a verb—I mean, you have to BE happy—you have to CHOOSE that way of life and set forth on that journey.  The destination of happiness can only be found after we do one thing:  SEEK GOD.  St. Augustine tells us “only He who made man makes man happy.”

“God wants us to be happy.  But where does the source of this hope lie?  It lies in a communion with God, who lives in the depths of the soul of every man.”  --Brother Roger Schutz

“Happiness is not in us, nor is happiness outside of us.  Happiness is in God alone.  And if we have found him, then it is everywhere.”  --Blaise Pascal

Lord, let me know happiness in a way that I never have truly and fully known.  Let me know that you will bring it and show it to me in the people and places and things around me.  Let me trust that you, above all, are the source of that freedom.  Open my heart to receive it.