What is Love: The Struggle for Happiness

I was re-watching an old favorite show of mine, House. I tend to re-watch shows as a coping method for anxiety and I am experiencing a lot of stress right now. But there was a comment that someone made on an episode that gave me another revelation.

The episode was about a cancer researcher who had quit her job even though she was 5-10 years away from achieving a cure for a very deadly cancer. Everyone in the episode was on the attack because they couldn't understand how she could quit such an important job, not only for her sake but for the world's.

Her argument to this was that she had a health scare and it made her realize that she had never been happy. So she decided that she would stop working on research and start working on finding happiness. This declaration led to a lot of conversations about the selfishness of her actions and how she was wasting her talent.

One of her doctor's commented that he didn't want to have regrets on his deathbed. That's when she said something that flipped a switch in my brain. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was basically that you spend one day of your life on your deathbed and that you shouldn't worry about that day, you should focus on the rest of the days of your life instead.

So my question is, is she right? Should we stop focusing on what we're achieving and start focusing on finding happiness? What does God want for us, to struggle all of our lives to find fulfillment or to pursue happiness?

My answer to the first two is yes. But what about the third one? Does God want us to be happy? I believe the answer to that is yes as well.

Our society paints a picture of God being this cruel taskmaster who is only concerned about punishing us when we do the smallest thing wrong and the church often perpetuates that image.

You may be thinking, what about the churches that preach love and happiness all while milking their parishioners for all they're worth to pad the pastor's pockets?

It's true that both kinds of churches exist in our country, I'm not going to deny it. But it's because there is no balance of love and discipline preached in today's church and very little teaching about God's true nature.

The reason for this, in my opinion, is that there's an overwhelming problem in today's society, especially in our country: bad parenting.

You might think that sounds crazy and wonder how parents can cause people to not know God. We could go into the whole nature versus nurture argument, which I could talk about for hours, but I won't because the answer is so simple.

The Bible states over and over how God is our Father. After all, He created us and that's what fathers do. But because of the lack of really, truly good fathers in this world, we have come to associate the characteristics of our earthly fathers with our Heavenly Father.

Now I'm not blaming it all on the men because bad mothers can create the same association, I'm just making a point.

If your father was never around and didn't care about you or help you in any way, you tend to think that God is the same way. If your father was an abusive taskmaster who wanted perfection above all else, you think God wants the same thing.

I could go on and on with examples, but you get the picture. If we had a bad experience with our father (or mother), we automatically attribute those same characteristics to God.

It's an understandable mistake to make. How can you truly know who God is without knowing what a good parent is?

The only way to know is to truly understand what unconditional love means. But how do we do that? Well, I'm going to help you right now by using my own revelation of this part of God's nature.

I didn't have a great birth father. He was kind of an absentee parent when I was little, the typical I'll go to work and mom can take care of the kids sort of dad.

The problem was that when my mom left him after he stopped working altogether, he ghosted us for a long time.

Eventually we started seeing him every other weekend and I thought, maybe he does care about us, he was just going through the pain of divorce.

However, later in life, I found out that my mom had to strong-arm him into seeing us at all and he basically never paid child support. He was the definition of a dead-beat dad.

When I found out, I had a lot of resentment towards him and held unforgiveness in my heart because of it.

I could talk about the power of forgiveness all day, but the basic idea is that not forgiving someone is not hurting them, it's only hurting you.

When I found that out, I forgave him and felt so much better. However, the damage that he had caused my self esteem and self love had already taken hold of me in a very bad way.

At the age of twenty, I married a man who was abusive in every way a person can be. I experienced emotional abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse on a daily basis for nearly eleven years before I was able to get away from him.

I'm not going to start on the topic of why I didn't leave because, again, I could talk all day about it. But the real reason was because I had such terrible self esteem that I thought he was right when he said I was fat, ugly, and stupid.

Now I'm not trying to brag, but I am nowhere near ugly or stupid and the only reason that I got fat was because I was depressed from over a decade of that kind of abuse.

I weighed 125 pounds when we got married and he called me fat, so it definitely wasn't true, but my self esteem problems made me believe it which made it happen.

I also have a 125 IQ which is considered highly intelligent as well as two degrees. And in the looks department, my dear departed second husband thought I was a knockout.

Again, not trying to brag, just to give the facts about how wrong he was and how low my self esteem was.

But the thing that gave me more confidence in myself and showed me that I had never been in love with my abusive ex was the birth of my son.

It actually started while I was pregnant, the feeling of overwhelming love for the little bundle that I carried inside of me and it only grew to full blown unconditional love once he was born and I looked into his pretty blue eyes.

Feeling what it truly meant to love unconditionally, I knew that what my ex and I had was not even close to it.

But it also revealed to me how God feels about us. As a parent, I know that I would do anything for my child, even to the point of dying for him and that is why I was eventually able to get strong enough to leave my ex.

It doesn't matter what my son does to me, he could hate me, call me a bad mom, or even spit in my face and I would still be there for him as soon as he needed me.

However, that doesn't mean that I didn't discipline him while he was growing up. I didn't beat him until he had marks on his skin like his dad did, but if he was trying to run into the road I would yell for him to stop and sometimes even angrily fuss at him.

But once the lesson had been learned, I would hug and kiss him and dry his tears. I would also tell him how much I loved him and that I wasn't really angry, just worried about his safety.

And that is who God is, a parent that sometimes can't help but get angry and punish his children, but only out of fear for their safety and well-being.

He wants for us to be happy, but He also doesn't want us to get hurt. He doesn't care about sin for His own sake, but for ours.

Just like I don't want my son to do drugs or become an alcoholic because he could die or seriously hurt himself, God doesn't want us to suffer because he's concerned for our safety. He truly loves us unconditionally.

The best example of this in the Bible is Jesus's tale of the prodigal son. You can read the whole story in Luke 15:11-32, but I'll give you a short summary.

There was a man who had two sons, the older who was very obedient and the younger who was rather wild and reckless.

When he came of age, the younger son asked his father if he could get his inheritance early and go see what the wide world had to offer. His father, who I'm sure was worried but also loved him deeply, agreed to the arrangement.

The young son took his inheritance and went out into the world, spending his money freely on all of the pleasures of life.

The Bible doesn't say specifically what he did, but it's likely that he spent money on drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, and the like.

Eventually he ran out of money and was in a bad way and began to starve because of a severe drought in the land. So he got a job at a farm feeding pigs, but still got barely any food and was tempted to eat the pig slop.

However, he began to realize that there were servants in his father's house who had more food than he had, so he decided to go back home.

But he was ashamed of the things he had done and how he had squandered his father's money. So he was determined to go back, apologize for his behavior, and ask to become a hired servant at his father's house.

I'm sure that he was nervous about how his father would receive him and how much disappointment he would feel in his youngest son. He probably thought about it the whole of the long journey home.

But when he got on his father's road, still starving and still a long way from the house, his father saw him coming down the road.

Instead of standing there crossing his arms and tapping his foot with a disappointed look on his face, his father ran to him, hugged him tight, and kissed him.

The son was astonished at this reaction and blurted out that he had sinned against him and was no longer worthy of his father's love.

But instead of condemning him or even agreeing with him, his father yelled to his servants to bring him the best clothes and jewelry for him to wear and to butcher a cow so they could celebrate his son's return.

The father said, "'For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found ...,’" (Luke 15:24, NIV).

When he heard the good news, the oldest son got angry at his father and refused to join in the celebration.

His father came out and asked him to come celebrate as well, but the older son yelled at him saying that he had done nothing but what his father asked his whole life and yet his father had never celebrated him like he did for his wild and reckless child.

His father calmly told him that he was always with his oldest son and that his son was welcome to anything he wanted in his father's house. But his youngest son was dead but now alive, lost but now found, and that was truly something to celebrate.

How many of us can relate to the older brother in this story? For years I thought about this when I was in the depths of depression because of my ex.

I thought, I have done nothing but what God wants from me and yet I am plagued by trouble, pain, sickness, and heartache. But there are so many people out there that do nothing good and God blesses them with health and happiness. Why was I not worthy of the same?

But God revealed to me that in that deepest darkness that He was still with me, sustaining me, helping me to cope with the abuse and helping me to gain strength to finally get out.

And He was doing that, I was just shutting Him out like the older brother did his dad and younger brother.

But when He gave me this revelation, I turned towards Him once again and found peace and strength. Without His help, I wouldn't have made my truly miraculous escape when I did and may have suffered even worse indignities.

Yes, God will let us wander this broken world, doing all the things we want and hurting ourselves non-stop. But that doesn't mean that He's not anxiously waiting for us to come back home to Him and overjoyed when we finally do.

It also means that even when we are doing right that God is still with us all the time if we just stop for a minute, turn to Him, and listen for His voice.

So, yes, God wants us to be happy, and the best way for us to do that is to turn to Him, give him our worries, cares, and burdens, and let Him take over.

He may still get frustrated at us when we hurt ourselves or others, but He gave us the perfect gift of forgiveness in the form of Jesus dying for us.

He literally came down to Earth Himself and died to set us free from all of the world's pain, fear, and misery.

But we can't just keep hurting ourselves and expect Him to come save us like it's His job. We have to humble ourselves and ask for His help.

Then even in the darkest moments of our lives, He will be with us and will help us to be truly free and happy.