The Happiness You Can’t Seem to Find

When I hear the special ringtone, I know it’s time.

Like most new, faraway grandparents, we are deeply grateful for FaceTime. We watch our granddaughter’s hair and limbs grow, and witness new teeth and new words. But our favorite parts of these video calls are the songs, sung off-key in real-time, across several state lines.

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands…

That song never disappoints, with new gestures created each time. 

But it’s the “you know it” that has followed me around lately. That and my granddaughter’s tenacity.

Hazel claps her song through tears and frustration, through the flu and earaches, through I-can’t-wait-for-supper and I-didn’t-get-enough-sleep. Because the “happy” is deep down. She can’t help it. 

She is taken care of, and secure. She is safe in stronger arms. And as her song says—she knows it.

DEEPER THAN HAPPY

While Hazel’s words say “happy” what she is experiencing is actually “joy.”

Feelings go in a completely separate bucket: sad, angry, disappointed, even happy. God encourages us to feel all those emotions. He knows we will as we succeed and struggle in this still-broken world. And we see them throughout Scripture. But we shouldn’t confuse these God-given feelings with the knowing that underlies every one of them. 

As Suzie Eller says in her book JoyKeeper:

Joy is more than a feeling. It’s a knowing.

Suzie Eller

I don’t remember her displaying her feelings much, but I do remember Mom’s devotion. (Back when I vowed never to become my mother, before I realized what a wonderful thing it would be if I did.) Mom knew that the joy of heaven will be Him. She sought him daily and desperately on earth, and I know she has found Him dearly and deeply on the other side of Eternity. She knew joy is constant, regardless of where we are in life. Though cancer and concerns and kids must have caused her to not feel so happy at times, she always knew joy. 

Only a flimsy happiness can be tied to desired outcomes that change day to day. Joy is anchored to something permanent. And my mother, more than anyone in my life, knew it.

Only a flimsy happiness can be tied to desired outcomes that change day to day. Joy is anchored to something permanent.

lori ann wood

Yet, somehow my generation has turned joy into a seasonal word, a casual slogan—a surface feeling. But Scripture tells us otherwise. Knowing full well what was about to happen, this joy couldn’t have been a feeling for Jesus. It had to be something deeper:

For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Hebrews 12:2

It’s not a plastic, mind-over-matter forced smile.

It’s a knowing of Him that can’t be taken away or dimmed, no matter what story we find ourselves in. 

True joy springs irrepressibly from the heart and is always rooted in our theology. Which explains why joy can appear in the middle of a crisis and coexist with pain, brokenness, grief, or loneliness. Joy isn’t grounded in our circumstances; it is grounded in the unchanging character of God.

Carolyn Custis James

STEEPED IN SUFFERING

We know that this world brings trouble, but we keep one eye on the exit when suffering enters the room. Suffering often comes at a cost to every part of us. The secret is finding the joy that can carry us when our bodies and minds and souls are weary, no matter how far away the finish line lies. Through my 8+ years of heart failure, sometimes I’ve found myself desperate for the joy I used to take for granted. On those days, I lean hard into the knowing. Into Him.

Joy is not the absence of suffering, but the presence of God.

Janet Erskine Stuart

And turns out, suffering not only needs joy, it can produce it as well.

The joy of God has gone through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Suffering actually helps us see joy because it helps us find Him. 

Pain and suffering are frequently the means by which we become motivated to finally surrender to God and seek the cure of Christ…that’s what we need most desperately. That’s what will bring us the supreme joy of knowing Jesus.

Peter John Kreeft

Though I wish—for all of us— it came through a different door, sometimes suffering is the best producer of joy. And sometimes the one suffering and finding joy might not be the one you first see.

From my journal:

Most days I feel like this illness has swallowed up not just my life, but my husband’s life as well. And there’s a certain burden in that. A planned future, tweaked and tainted. Trips cancelled or cut short. As the healthy one, I know he shoulders a guilty disappointment, too. But he never says a word. He is always chasing the knowing he mentioned to me years ago, that God really is up to something here. And my husband is always excited about what that might be.

SOMETHING TO HOLD ONTO

For us bigger people, sometimes we assume a song (or a prayer) won’t fix our problem. And it won’t. Unless we decide to go deep. To dig in like Hazel, and go past our feelings. To tap into what makes us who we are and Who did that making. 

It’s a knowing that even when life is not good, God still is. It’s a knowing that when the world is on fire, and we hurt in all kinds of new ways we don’t recognize or even understand, it’s here we first realize a deep longing for Home. It’s here we find something to hold onto. Through the thick and thin slices of life—through things we haven’t gotten over, days we wish we could do over, and memories we still cry over. 

Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes.

Frederick Buechner

We didn’t teach Hazel the “Happy and You Know It” song. She learned it at her daycare. Whenever they leave the room together, they hold onto a rope. Though song time is an event in itself, sometimes Hazel’s class sings while they’re headed to recess. When they do, it’s probably not “Happy and You Know It.” Because their feet are busy walking and their hands are busy holding on. 

Like my own growing faith, that rope keeps the wandering-prone children tethered, not corralled, not even really restrained. It just gives them something to hold onto. That’s what joy does for our faith in dangerous times.

Joy is this tether to God that can’t be taken away by a test result, a highway accident, or someone else’s decision.

Joy is this tether to God that can’t be taken away by a test result, a highway accident, or someone else’s decision.

lori ann wood

In my clearest moments, I want to be more like Paul (and my mother and my husband and my granddaughter). I want to count it all joy when I face the dark times (James 1:2). Because that’s when I know God best.

Maybe your own joy feels like it got swept out with the tinsel way back on December 26. Maybe it was the diagnosis or the divorce, the bankruptcy or the betrayal. The truth is, because of what you’ve been through, what you’re searching for is likely still there; it has probably been there all along.  And now you’re even more ready to perceive it.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.…When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

Kahlil Gibran

To find the kind of sturdy knowing that will last your whole life long, no matter what the news says, or the boss says, or doctor says, the key is this:

Hold tight to the Rope.

Go deep looking for that elusive happiness-that-you-know.

And when you find her, rename her “Joy.”

Listen to this post read by the author HERE.