How to find Happiness and Peace

Today is the busiest shopping day of the year. Under the guise of celebrating God coming into the world in the person of Jesus, we will buy lots of stuff today. We humans tend to live our lives in pursuit of more. More money. More power. More fame. More stuff. He who dies with the most toys wins. Whatever the thing is we want more of it. Maybe the ideal then is more like “He who has the most toys has won already and doesn’t have to wait to die to have heaven.”

If I had a bigger house I’d be happy. If I had a nicer car I’d be happy. If I had a better husband or wife I’d be happy. If I had better teachers I’d be happy. If I had a better job I’d be happy. We want the upgrade. We want our lives supersized. We want more.

Now that’s a generalization, but it’s not a completely unfair one. If we didn’t want more and better things, if we didn’t think they would make us happy, then advertisements would work differently. But ads tell us we need more and better stuff to make us happy because it’s what our culture wants to believe. But is it true?

Of course not. You know this without me telling you. You want the stuff, but inside you know stuff alone won’t make you happy. But better to be unhappy on my new boat than unhappy on the couch at home, right? And how unhappy could I be if I had that boat, oh, and the trailer of course, and the truck to tow it.

The Bible’s solution to finding peace is found along other places in the Book of James which says, “And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.” The New Living Translation does a better job of preserving the meaning of the Greek while getting the verse in an order that works better in English in saying, “And those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of goodness.”

So if you want the harvest of goodness, if you want life to go well, you have to plant seeds of peace. For James this runs counter to the natural human tendency for more and better. This goes against the very pursuit of what the other guy has. If you want happiness you can’t start with nurturing the envy and selfish ambition inside yourself. And if you want peace, in your life and in the world, then you will have to plant the seeds of peace inside yourself.

If you don’t have happiness and peace within yourself, then you can’t find peace anywhere else. But once you can find happiness and peace within yourself you’ll start to find them everywhere you look.

This sounds like self-help pop psychology, but the pop psychologist sells this line because it works. The only sure thing you get from the pursuit of more and better stuff is not a larger and better life. The only sure thing you get from the pursuit of more and better stuff is more and bigger debts.

All of this we know apart from God and we can show that common sense, conventional wisdom, pop psychology and even the well thought out concepts of the best and brightest people working in psychology all fit with the idea that happiness and peace start within, not without.

But we also find this theme amplified in Christian writings. Famed Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote, “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

For the great writer, pursuing happiness and peace apart from God is to try to continually redefine happiness and peace. I would be happy if… I would have peace in my life if…

But instead of this endless pursuit, what if we stopped and acknowledged that if the whole Christian story is true, then there is a loving creator who wants what is best for us. That loving creator wants happiness and peace for us and the way to find that happiness and peace is in coming to terms with ourselves. Finding peace within means figuring out that we really are okay. We really are worthy of being loved.

The message of the world is “you would be lovely if…” While the message of God is you are lovely just as you are and because I love you so much I want something even better for you. This is what Jesus said. This is how Jesus acted. And throughout human history there have been score of Christians who have gotten this wrong and hurt others. But there have also been millions of examples, of people who got this message of God’s love deep within their bones and found it transformative.

God made the world to work around the principle of love and the love that starts it all is loving yourself. Notice that God doesn’t say love others. God says to love them as you love yourself.

There is no room for self-loathing because that is self defeating. Instead the goal is to build yourself up. Realize that you are worthy of love and then you’ll come to see that others are worthy of that love to. Start acting like they are worthy of love and they’ll come to seem it more and more.

We are not the victim of our feelings. By changing our actions our feelings can come to change. Not sure you love your Mom and Dad anymore? Act like you love them. Treat them lovingly and some of that will change. The same applies to your husband or wife. If you act like you don’t love them, then feelings will follow. But if you act on the love you want to have, love can be nurtured and grow.

From a Christian standpoint we see this is because this is the way God made the world to work. God created the world out of love, animated the world with love and wants us to live into that love. Hold on tight to your own needs. Turn inward only concerned for yourself and what you don’t have and aren’t getting out of life and you will just be nurturing bitterness, envy, cravings the Book of James would say.

Rather turn inward and see yourself as God sees you and you will find that you can have peace now, without the bigger house, the better truck, the nicer boat or the more loving spouse. You can find peace and happiness by coming to see that God’s love for you is real and you really are worth loving. Then from that place of being basically happy, you can sow seeds of peace in your life with loving actions toward those around you.

It is the pursuit of more, more, more. But it is the pursuit of more love. More love for God. More love for your neighbor and more love for yourself.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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