Joy Makes Room for Happiness
Truly joyful people never miss an opportunity to have a good time.
There seems to be something about having joy on the inside that makes a person more capable of fully participating in opportunities for happiness when they come.
Joyful people pay attention.
They inhabit the spaces around them.
They can go to dinner and actually be at dinner. They can attend a celebration and participate in the celebration. They can sit around a table with people they love and, without effort, make the atmosphere more enjoyable.
They don't just show up to places where delightful things are happening.
They are an integral part of what makes those experiences delightful. And I think there is a difference.
Because we tend to think that certain environments produce happiness. Vacations are fun. Parties are fun. Restaurants are enjoyable. Holidays are joyful. Being around people we love should make us happy.
But none of those things guarantees that anyone will enjoy them.
You can put a person in the middle of a perfectly good time and they can remain almost completely untouched by it.
And you can put another person in a very ordinary environment and somehow the environment becomes more enjoyable because they are there.
God-given joy has something to do with that.
Joy on the inside makes room for happiness.
It gives us the capacity to recognize opportunities for delight, receive them and fully participate in them when they come.
I think, a lot of the time, we have this backwards.
We spend a lot of time trying to arrange circumstances that will make us happy without ever considering whether we have become people capable of experiencing much happiness once we get there.
Because people who don't have much joy internally can still have a good time.
But they are much more dependent on things outside of themselves to create it.
And I think that dependence changes the way we enter these spaces.
When we come looking for an experience to make us happy, we aren't just there to enjoy it anymore.
We need something from it.
And once we need something from it, we start paying attention to entirely different things.
Who is getting the attention?
Who seems happier than me?
Who has more?
Who looks better?
Who is being celebrated?
Are people impressed by me?
Are we having as good a time as everyone else seems to be having?
Something that was supposed to be an opportunity for delight can very quickly become an opportunity for comparison, competition, one-upmanship and ego.
Not necessarily because anything went wrong.
But because we came needing the experience to do something for us that it was never capable of doing.
Instead of being open to just receive, we start measuring what we are getting and comparing.
And that makes it incredibly difficult to enjoy anything.
Because walking joyfully into a room requires individuality. It requires the freedom to have your own experience without constantly measuring it against everyone else's.
Joyful people bring that freedom with them.
They don't need to be the most interesting person at the table to enjoy the conversation. They don't need to have the best story to laugh at someone else's. Someone else's happiness doesn't diminish their own. Someone else's attention doesn't have to become their attention.
They are free to participate.
And because they are free to participate, they often add to the very happiness everyone else came looking for.
People looking for happiness are much more dependent on spaces specifically designed for enjoyment, or on being around people who already know how to enjoy themselves.
Someone else has to bring the delight.
And that's fine for a while.
But going from one event to another looking for the next opportunity to feel good doesn't make for a joyful life long term.
I think we underestimate this.
We assume a good time is primarily the product of good circumstances when very often it is the product of people who know how to have one.
That doesn't mean circumstances don't matter. There are environments that are just miserable. There are seasons where there simply isn't much to enjoy. And that’s okay. Because being joyful doesn't require us to pretend we’re happy all the time.
But even in difficult times, there are also countless opportunities for delight that God gives us. Truly joyful people are more able to recognize them when they come.
They have a different perspective on life. They aren't just showing up for a good time, waiting to see if enough is happening around them to make them feel good.
They don't enter every good moment needing to extract something from it.
They are free to observe.
Free to give.
Free to delight in someone else's enjoyment without needing to compete with it.
Free to add something without needing to be the center of it.
They bring something with them.
And because they do, they don't just experience more of the happiness available around them.
They make more of it available to everyone else.