Happiness

Last week’s TIME magazine featured a study on the science of happiness. We all want to be happy. However, before you could get to the featured story, you had to get past page after page of devastation from the tsunami and the war in Iraq. It was as if they were saying, “Here’s what it takes to be happy, but we don’t think you have a right to happiness as long as there is so much suffering and injustice in the world.”
I checked, and it seems that the word “happy” is only found 24 times in the New International Version, and “happiness” 6 times. How depressing! However, I found over two hundred references for the word, “joy.” Nelson’s Bible dictionary lists joy as a state of being, which expresses happiness over God’s righteousness and salvation, and that can be present even in times of unhappiness. There’s hope for us yet! “Rejoice in the Lord always,” said the apostle Paul, while chained to a Roman soldier. “Again I say, rejoice!” True happiness is a gift from God, that comes from being one with Him in spirit and purpose