Are you happy? Our modern context has divided happiness from joy, claiming happiness to be a fleeting delight while joy is a much deeper and long lasting peace that can be found only in God.  This distinction is a recent development, as it is clear in John Wesley’s writings that happiness here on earth is a direct result of pursuing holiness in God.  The word “blessed” found in the beatitudes can also just as easily be translated as “happy,” as we see in the Common English Bible translation. “Happy are the people who have pure hearts, because they will see God” (Matt 5:8). The God who is love is also the God who is pure happiness.  We are made in the image of this blessed, happy, loving God, and therefore we can expect to experience happiness as we draw nearer to this God.  This is not a happiness that we must wait until heaven to experience.  Because we can know God here and now, we can know happiness here and now.

For John Wesley, and countless theologians before and after him, delighting in God’s goodness, being transformed in holiness in this life, is the key to true happiness.  Holiness is loving God with our entire being, and loving our neighbor as ourselves.  The two loves go hand in hand.  When I first experienced an evangelical conversion as a teenager, I became infatuated with God.  I would get lost in worship, with eyes closed and hands raised.  I would pray in tongues with great passion. But this did not automatically translate into love for neighbor.  It actually left me super judgmental and gave me a spiritual superiority complex.  I had to be trained to love others the way God does, and that tempered my passions in worship.  It became less about ME and Jesus and more about US and Jesus.  And that us is broad, it opens the table wide.

I have become weary at the polarization existing in the world today.  Compromise and meeting in the middle has become a dirty concept.  If we do not agree on politics or religion than we must be enemies.  It’s hard to practice holiness in that environment, which makes it hard to be happy.  I think having social media gives us all this grand platform to make sweeping statements, to cancel our neighbor, to indulge in performative allyship without really doing the work or giving the money.  We make our stance known and then we shut down the possibility for conversation or compassion.  It’s hard to be happy living like that.

Perhaps this is naive, but I think the call to holiness, and therefore happiness, is to go deeper than slogans and hashtags, to build relationships with others and do the hard work of loving people on the ground.  We don’t need to report it with loud trumpets.  Give money to organizations that are doing the work to bring about justice. Donate your time and energy to the least, the last, and the lost.  Have a meal with someone you disagree with, show them kindness.  Build kinship across racial lines. Make a pen pal with a prisoner.  Take some home baked goods to that lonely widow neighbor.

Look for Christ in every face. In your pursuit of holiness, I have come to believe that you will also find happiness.