During a routine yahoo email check I was struck by an all too common advertisement in the side bar. “Find your version of happiness,” brightly displayed under the heading of Yahoo! Personals (the online dating network). Think about that. Where does this appeal come from? “Find your version of happiness…” This phrase says a lot about how we tend to see our relationships, particularly dating relationships.
First of all, think about what this is actually saying: “You have your own special version of happiness that you need to find. And in case you didn’t know where to find that special happy place you’re longing for, we’re going to help you out. We will enhance your dating life. Once you find that person who matches you, completes you, and just makes you feel all warm inside, your search for happiness is over.” This is a horribly self-centered way to think about any sort of relationship. It is objectification. We objectify someone when we are concerned primarily with how that person caters to our needs. We turn them into an object by disregarding their personhood and seeing them only as a source of fulfillment. You set some person, or some quality of that person, in a place they were never meant to be:
The place of worship.
Why does this happen? Why the need to worship? to want? You have emptiness and a dissatisfaction with the way things are for a reason. They must and should be satisfied, but only by the One who put those desires within you, nothing else. That one is God. Not a thing. Not a person. People make horrible Gods. That should be self evident, but we so love to worship the wrong thing; it should be plain to us that we are coming to worship the wrong things—and wrong people—as our gods. This is not a new thing! People have always “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:23).
If you are unhappy and unsatisfied, please do not make the mistake of charging another human being with the task of gratifying that emptiness you feel. We do find great happiness and fulfillment in relationships, but if we lose the purpose of showing God as the one to be worshiped and treasured, we only deepen the emptiness of our own souls! I know that feeling is all too familiar for many of us.
Your version of happiness will not be enough if you look for and find it through cheesy Yahoo! Personals, or anything else in this world. Jesus Christ’s death on the cross made it possible for us to have a relationship with God. That is where true happiness found; because only in that relationship can you do what you were made to do. You were made to worship.
C. S. Lewis once said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that i was made for another world.” Let’s look forward to this other perfect world we were created for and the One who prepares that world—God, the One who is truly worthy of our affection.
4 Comments on "Find Your Version of Happiness?"
Amen. Amen. Amen.
I second that amen.
Or, I fourth that amen, I suppose.
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