Does God want us to be happy?

That was the title of a 2005 Time Magazine article that appeared as a link at the bottom of this recent posting on waywords.wordpress.com. The link leads to what looks like a table of contents. The only actual article I've been able to read from there, though, is The New Science of Happiness (printable version here).

This is well worth a read. I found it very interesting that things that tend to make us happy are also things that God commands. I'll admit to having some bias here (no, really!) but here's my take on it.

• Friends are really important. And friends are what we'll have if we walk in the light, encourage each other and build each other up, and so on. God also tells us that two are better than one, and he commands us not to stop meeting together. This will likely have positive effects on our happiness:

  ...students with the highest levels of happiness and the fewest signs of depression were their strong ties to friends and family and commitment to spending time with them.

• The Israelites were urged many times in the Old Testament to remember what the Lord had done for them. Commands like Give thanks to the Lord appear frequently, along with exhortations to "remember the Lord your God," as well as positive examples of remembering things God had done for them. Keeping a "gratitude journal" seems to make people happier:

  ...taking the time to conscientiously count their blessings once a week significantly increased subjects' overall satisfaction with life...

• God wants us to serve others -- caring for orphans and widows for example, or as Isaiah puts it, meet the needs of the hungry and oppressed. And all kinds of good things come when we do.

  Another happiness booster, say positive psychologists, is performing acts of altruism or kindness--visiting a nursing home, helping a friend's child with homework, mowing a neighbor's lawn, writing a letter to a grandparent.

• The Apostle Paul says quite a bit about finding and exercising our gifts -- whatever your gift is, exercise it, he says, to build up the church.

  Seligman's biggest recommendation for lasting happiness is to figure out (courtesy of his website, reflectivehappiness.com) your strengths and find new ways to deploy them.

I think I stumbled upon this last item recently, as I wrote last month. It's also not completely unrelated to something I heard about satisfaction at work: "If your job uses only 10% of your abilities, you'll be 90% bored." (Or dissatisfied. Or something.)

Bottom line: Does God want us to be happy? I think yes. Besides the above, I see Jesus's comments in Luke 14:8-11 as helping us to get what we want and to be happy. He's realistic, in other words; he knows we want to be honored by others and he accepts that. He doesn't say, "Don't desire that!" Instead, he tacitly approves of the desire, but tells us how to get what we want. Because he knows what we're like; he remembers that we are but dust.