Have Faith, Be Happy?

Last week, Bonnie Gray over at Faith Barista posed this question for her ongoing blogging jam on faith: How does your faith connect to your happiness?

I thought back to something that happened to a friend of mine many years ago. She walked out on her husband and children to (eventually) marry a co-worker. And her reason was that “God wants me to be happy.” Well, that was the reason she gave. It was a lot more personally palatable to say that than “I’m destroying my family because I think I’ve fallen in love with another man.” In a real sense, she was assigning responsibility for her own actions to God.

I’ve been suspicious of happiness ever since.

It’s not one of the major themes of the Bible. There are about 20 references to words translated as happy, including quite a few in Psalms. But happiness as a concept is mostly connected to obedience and service. There is no statement or passage or teaching in the Bible that could conceivably be stretched to justify abandoning your family because “God wants me to be happy.”

The point of the universe is not our individual happiness. Somewhere along the line we decided that the Declaration of Independence (our creator endowing us with certain inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”) was biblical. The pursuit of happiness may be American, but that doesn’t translate into happiness being the point of our faith, or why God created us in the first place.

We’re called to be faithful. That doesn’t mean we’re called to be happy. Nor does being faithful mean that we will automatically be happy, at least in the sense we understand it.

I think of happiness as a temporal, and temporary, thing. Too many things can overcome it. It’s more a fleeting emotion as opposed to a steady state of being. If someone asked me if I was a happy person, I would have to think about it, but I think I would say I consider myself a blessed person, and that’s more important than my notions of happiness.


To see more posts about faith and happiness, visit Bonnie at Faith Barista.

Photograph: Happy Face by Vera Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Pearl

One thing he didn’t say
about the pearl of great
price is what force and
energy and friction are
needed to shape it and
mold it and polish it.
Otherwise, it’s just an
ugly piece of grit,
suitable for irritating
the stomachs of oysters.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Wednesday, sponsored by OneStopPoetry. The links will be live at 4 p.m. central time today.

Condemnation

Inescapable facts:
stark knowledge refuses
to fade into hidden memory,
instead splintering its way
into carefully constructed
walls, opening catalogs of
wrongs, hurts, wounds,
injuries, the seven deadlies
afflicted and received.
Resolutions cast aside.
Determinations sidetracked.
Commitments forgotten.
Promises broken.
Canopies of fig leaves
open at the slightest wind
to reveal separation,
separateness, isolation,
nakedness, shame.
Disobedience is just
another pounded nail.


To see others posts on condemnation, please visit the One Word Blog Carnival over at Bridge Chumbley’s place.

Photograph: Nails by Teodoro S. Gruhl via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Travis Thrasher's Love Stories

Author Travis Thrasher is today associated with well written suspense novels like Isolation and Ghostwriter, including Solitary, the first book in his new Young Adult series. (He’s also got three other writing projects underway for publication in 2011 – the guy not only writes well but he writes well and prolifically.)

Interestingly enough, Thrasher started his writing career with two collections of love stories.

Because I like his novels, and because I usually like to read everything by an author I like, I was able to get my hands on both collections (one was easy; the other was not and took quite some time before an Amazon affiliate got hold of it). The first is The Promise Remains/The Watermark: A Collection of Love Stories (2001) and the second is Three Roads Home: Stories of First Love & Second Chances (2003).

The Promise Remains/The Watermark is two novellas. In The Promise Remains, a young couple who fall in love during a summer camp find their way back to each other (and just in time to avert one’s pending marriage). The Watermark is a more contemporary interpretation of the story of the prodigal son, in which a young man from a wealthy family experiences years of guilt for the responsibility he bears for the death of a young woman because he was DWI.

Three Roads Home is a collection of three novellas, and they continue the themes of first loves and second chances found in the earlier volume. In Somebody, a young married couple have an argument about the wife’s suspected infidelity just as the husband is going out the door to catch a plane to Germany; the plane crashes in the Atlantic. In In Care Of, a successful author with a family he loves receives an email from his first love, and then faces the possibility of meeting her. In Still Life at Sunset, a young woman returns home to make peace with her past, and discovers an old love.

I like these stories. Thrasher early on was demonstrating his ability as a storyteller. But I discovered something else. These love stories foreshadow a number of the later suspense novels to come.

That shouldn’t have surprised me. A love story, after all, has elements of suspense, even considering the suspense is about “will they get together” as opposed to “will they get killed.”

But there are also specific stories lines and plot developments in the love stories that will see a different kind of treatment later on. The geography of The Promise Remains, for example, is very much like the geography of Solitary and plays much the same role. There is a Mexico parasailing event in Still Life at Sunset that will become a major element of the novel Sky Blue (and one of my Thrasher favorites). And then there are the surprise twists and plot developments that are used so well in both the love stories and the later suspense novels.

The love stories all stand on their own, as do the later suspense novels. But they’re of a piece, and it’s interesting to identify and understand the connections. But whether you read his love stories or his suspense novels, you're in for some good reading.

Who Defines Stickiness?

We’reached the final chapter of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survivie and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. The authors have covered the “basics” of stickiness, and now point to four villains that will undo and circumvent stickiness every time:

• The natural tendency to bury the lead – to hide (usually unintentionally) what the real point is.

• A focus on the presentation rather than the message. The forms of a slide show, a formal speech, or a press release are not what should determine what you’re trying to say.

• Decision paralysis – when you have too much choice ot the situation is ambiguous.

• The “Curse of Knowledge” – where you confuse how you arrived at your idea or message and confuse it with how to communicate it. In other words, you communicate it like you were the audience (more on that word in a bit).

A good example the Heaths cite is that tool that has done more to destroy communicate than aything else in the modern era: PowerPoint. “Business managers,” they write, “seem to believe that, once they’ve clicked through a PowerPoint presentation showcasing their conclusions, they’ve successfully communicated their ideas. What they’ve done is share data.”

The point of all this is simple: don’t treat the people you’re trying to communicated with as an audience.

I wrote a paper on this once. I said that, for communication purposes and any other purpose, for that matter, employees are not an audience. No one you’re trying to communicate with is an audience. The word assumes a passive group of people who will listen and “get educated” or be entertained. A group of people watching a movie in a theater is an audience; a person watching a television show may be part of an audience. The person sitting in a conference room listening to you talk, the person in a large hall listening to you speak, or the people joining you for lunch are not an audience. Instead, they are people you’re trying to communicate with, perhaps build a relationship with or become part of a community with.

But they are anything but passive. And today they’re often tweeting what you’re saying while you say it, and offering their own commentary in the process.

(By the way, I wrote in my paper that “message,” as in “my message points,” also should be tossed on the trash heap of bad communications.)

Ultimately, it is the people you’re trying to communicate with who will define stickness. Understanding them, their needs, their desires, and how best to talk with them will make what you’re saying stick or be ignored as superfluous.


Laura Boggess has been leading a discussion of Made to Stick at The High Calling. Last weels discussion on stories can be found here.

The posts in this series:

On Simple: The One Time Something I Did Went Viral

On Unexpected: Singing Opera in Journalism Class

On Credible: As Concrete – as Air

On Concrete: It Was All in the Numbers

On Emotional: An Engineer Got Emotional
 
On Stories: The Sticky Stories of Billy Coffey

Bible Reading

The night I became a believer (almost 38 years ago), I was given a green padded-cover copy of The Living Bible. I had read portions of the Bible before, and even memorized scripture for catechism (King James Version), but I had never really read the Bible before.

I was told to start reading the Gospel of John. I had never read it, and it was like reading a revolutionary treatise. Yes, Jesus loved me. Yes, he had a wonderful plan for my life.

But Jesus was a bomb thrower.

I hadn’t met this Jesus before. He didn’t mince words. He could be loving and tender, but he could also be fierce. He didn’t duck confrontation. And he had this laser-like ability to cut right to what the real issues were.

This was a Jesus I had never met before, almost a complete stranger.

In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, reading the Bible and especially the gospels is what Michael Spencer says will change your life, and possibly change it radically. He also says that it is exactly this practice of “reading Jesus first-hand” that many in the church find so threatening.

I pondered that: the American Christian church would find reading the Bible to be radical and threatening? This sounded almost pre-Reformation.

I didn’t know what I thought this until I pictured Jesus showing up to turn over the tables of the moneychangers in the temple – and it could have been where the prosperity gospel was being preached.

Or showing up at any church that believed it had the whole thing figured out and theologically mapped. Or how he might challenge our own learned teachers and theologians. Or that we would likely find him in the inner cities and Third World ghettos instead of the typical American suburb. He would be wherever the hurting, the needy and the poor would be found.

Spencer isn’t advocating the overthrow of the church. “I believe in the importance of Christian community and the ministry of that community to provide boundaries and definition to our spiritual growth and healthy spirituality,” he writes. “I mourn, however, the loss of our openness to the voice of the Holy Spirit directing us in new and important Jesus-shaped directions…The natural conservatism of institutions is deeply rooted in the desire to survive, and that desire colors and limits the way they read the Bible and how they see God functioning in the world.”

I believe in the church. I believe in the local church. I believe I attend a solid, Bible-teaching, Jesus-based church.

But I still have that copy of The Living Bible. And I remember what it was like to “read Jesus” for the very first time.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page, Fatha Frank at Public Christianity and I have been reading Mere Churchianity. Check their blogs for more discussion. See in particular Fatha Frank’s post on “The Perfect Church?” and Nancy’s post on chapter 9 on the book.

Saturday Good Reads

If you got any free time for reading today, there is a lot of good stuff here.

Prose

“The bird of time” and "Maxi" by Louise Gallagher at Recover Your Joy.

“Worth” by A.G. Harmon at The Image Journal.

“I Know a Little Bit” by Michael Perkins at Untitled.

“The Monstrosity of Christ” by David Griffith for The Image Journal.

“What you need to do after next Sunday’s sermon” by Ann Voskamp at A Holy Experience.

“5 Characteristics of a Friend Who Cares” by Kevin Martineau at Shooting the Breeze.

“Of Fairy Tales and Monsters” by Billy Coffey.

“Speaking into Silence” by Karen Eck at Karenee Art.

“A Christian Mid-Life Crisis?” by Charity Singleton at Wide Open Spaces.

“Hold On Tight” by Jeff Jordan at To My Children, If They Are Listening.

“A Letter to North American Churches” by Makoto Fujimura.

“Conjuring the Ineffable” by Andy Whitman at The Image Journal.

“How Do You Know?” by Jessica McGuire at Jezamama.

“Is there a solution to bullying?” by Kathy Richards at Katdish.

"He doesn't give up on me, so how can I give up on you?" by David Rupert at Red-Letter Believers.

"The Cafe" by Jerry at Under the Door Frame.

"Family" by Sarah Salter at Living Between the Lines.

Poetry

“The Fall of New York” and “Spanish Steps” by Steven Marty Grant at Urbanality.

“Emily” and "Brown Around" by Jerry at Under the Doorframe.

“Worn” and “Once” by Nancy Rosback at Crossroads.

“Prayers of the People” by John Blasé at Dirty Shame.

“Waiting to be Inspired” and “All is Right” by Jeffrey Turner at The World Through My Eyes.

“Not Because of You” by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

“Falling” and “Reaching” by Melissa at All the Words.

“Who is for Dinner Tonight?” by Brian Miller at WayStationOne.

“A Bell Rung” by David Brydon at Poetry Blog.

“Our World’s More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand: The Stolen Child” by William Butler Yeats via Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage.

“Burnt Blood and Feathers” by Karen Eck at Karenee Art.

“Slip” by Bradley Moore at And the Other Thing Is.

“The Fun of the Morbid Man” by Fred Sprinkle at I Force It to Rhyme.

“Brush Against My Face” by Michael Perkins at Untitled.

"Autumn Winds" by Justinian at Delight and Glory and Oddity and Light.

Paintings and Photographs

“Watching” by Susan Etole at Just…A Moment.

“Another Autumn,” oil on paper by Randall David Tipton.

“Photo-Playing” by Laura Boggess at The Wellspring.

“America” by Nancy Rosback at Crossroads.

“Reflection” by Jessica McGuire at Jezamama.


Photograph: Lamp, by Nancy Rosback. Used with permission.