If You're Happy And You Know It

"...The joy of the Lord is your strength" Neh 8:10

The one word I add to my hope today is happy. I can't tell you the amount of emotions that have entertained my thoughts this week every time the word came up. Memories of happy people, events, seasons and thoughts moved within me. Many of them, however, caused me sadness as I thought of how they were long past.

Happiness, as I recognize it, is so temporary and fleeting. It seems to require maintenance. So often I question if I really ever have been?

I watched on television the National Figure Skating Competitions in St. Paul, Minnesota. I thought how happy they must be to have reached this point in their careers. There is such grace and poise in their form. I carefully took attention to their recovery to a fall or to a slight turning or landing at the wrong angle. The recovery often was as graceful as the moves of the dance as they completed their performance. To the untrained eye (such as mine) sometimes ony the call of the judge would reveal the error.

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Eph 5:15

So, first I looked up circumspect, definition being:

 "heedful of potential consequences". 

How often do I let my guard down in the area of my emotions? Yes, they are real. No, we shouldn't bury them and deny them, but shouldn't we treat them with some respect? We have all seen too often the results of emotions without restraint. If I am a child of God, what is robbing me of the happiness that I have been given? And do I see it as a gift?

I looked up the definition of happy in the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary, the first standardized dictionary of the English language. One of the definitions is:

Being in the enjoyment of agreeable sensations from the possession of good; enjoying pleasure from the gratification of appetites or desires. The pleasurable sensations derived from the gratification of sensual appetites render a person temporarily happy; but he only can be esteemed really and permanently happy who enjoys peace of mind in the favor of God. To be in any degree happy we must be free from pain both of body and of mind; to be very happy we must be in the enjoyment of lively sensations of pleasure, either of body or mind.

So yes, our definitions are right about happy, but according to this, only temporary. If I know I am in the favor of God and have peace with Him, that is permanent. When emotions are robbed, can I make a quick recovery back to my standing position with Christ, where only the righteous judge can make the call? He is the only one who knows the state of my relationship with Him and yes, He will call me out on it.

My prayer is:

As I take on Christ's perspective as my own, I can dance the dance with rest, in the quiet, all today, and when I fall, not stay down in defeat, but recover quickly because He has made me happy.